Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam

The Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam (Women's Reservation Act) was enacted as the Constitution (One Hundred and Sixth Amendment) Act, 2023, and reserves one-third of all seats in the Lok Sabha, the National Capital Territory of Delhi Legislative Assembly, and the legislative assemblies of the states for women. The legislation was introduced in the newly constructed Parliament building as the first bill of the special session in September 2023, passed the Lok Sabha on 20 September 2023 and the Rajya Sabha on 21 September 2023, and received presidential assent from President Droupadi Murmu on 28 September 2023. The Act inserts new Articles 330A and 332A into the Constitution, mirroring the existing structure of Articles 330 and 332 that govern reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and amends Article 239AA concerning Delhi. It also adds Article 334A, which conditions the commencement of the reservation on a delimitation exercise undertaken after the relevant census figures are published.

The procedural mechanics distinguish this amendment from ordinary legislation in two respects. First, because it alters the composition of legislatures and affects the federal distribution of representation, it required ratification under the proviso to Article 368(2)—approval by a special majority in each House (a majority of total membership and two-thirds of members present and voting) followed by ratification by the legislatures of not less than one-half of the states. Second, the operational trigger is deferred: under Article 334A, the reservation takes effect only after the first census conducted after the Act's commencement, and the seats reserved for women are to be earmarked through a delimitation exercise carried out on the basis of that census. The one-third reservation applies within the seats already reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes as well as in the general category, ensuring intersectional representation.

A central design feature is the rotation of reserved seats. Article 330A(3) and Article 332A provide that the specific constituencies reserved for women shall rotate after each subsequent delimitation, so that no single set of constituencies remains permanently reserved. The reservation is set to continue for fifteen years from commencement under Article 334A(4), though Parliament may extend it by law—paralleling the periodic extension mechanism used for SC and ST reservations under Article 334. Notably, the Act does not extend the quota to the Rajya Sabha or to state legislative councils, confining it to directly elected bodies. Nor does it contain a sub-quota for Other Backward Classes women, an omission that became one of the principal lines of parliamentary criticism.

The Act drew on a long legislative lineage. Earlier women's reservation bills were introduced in 1996 under the Deve Gowda government, again in 1998 and 1999 under the Vajpayee government, and most prominently in 2008 when the UPA government's bill passed the Rajya Sabha on 9 March 2010 but lapsed in the Lok Sabha. The 2023 enactment under the Modi government, with Law Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal moving the bill, finally secured passage with near-unanimous cross-party support, though the Asaduddin Owaisi–led AIMIM opposed it over the absence of an OBC and Muslim sub-quota. The naming of the statute in Hindi—invoking "reverence for women's power"—marked a stylistic departure from conventional English short titles.

The Adhiniyam should be distinguished from the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments of 1992, which reserved one-third of seats in panchayats and municipalities for women under Articles 243D and 243T; those grassroots quotas have operated for three decades and several states subsequently raised the figure to fifty percent. The 106th Amendment extends the principle to the national and state legislative tiers for the first time. It is also conceptually distinct from delimitation itself—the periodic redrawing of constituency boundaries—even though the Act makes delimitation the precondition for activation, a linkage that ties women's representation to the politically fraught question of seat reallocation between northern and southern states after the census.

The deferral clause has generated the sharpest controversy. Because the decennial census due in 2021 was postponed and a subsequent delimitation has not been completed, critics—including the Congress and several regional parties—argue that the reservation may not take practical effect until 2029 or later, rendering the immediate political gesture symbolic. Opposition members demanded that the quota be implemented from the next general election without awaiting census and delimitation, and pressed for an explicit OBC sub-category. Constitutional commentators have also noted the tension between freezing the total number of Lok Sabha seats until 2026 under the 84th Amendment and the delimitation contingency embedded in Article 334A, leaving the precise timeline legally uncertain as of the mid-2020s.

For the working practitioner—whether a UPAC aspirant addressing GS Paper 1 questions on Indian society, a desk officer tracking gender-policy commitments, or a researcher comparing legislative gender quotas—the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam represents both a landmark and a deferred promise. It situates India among the more than one hundred countries that employ legislated candidate or seat quotas for women, while its census-and-delimitation trigger illustrates how constitutional design can postpone substantive effect. Analysts should track the conduct of the next census, the ensuing delimitation, and any judicial challenge to the rotation or deferral provisions, since these will determine whether the one-third reservation translates into materially altered representation in the Lok Sabha and the state assemblies.