South Indian politicians should appreciate that India works best as a collective whole. File photo: PTI
With uneven pace of demographic transition, India's demographic dividend will operate over decades; South will need able-bodied talent from North to fill its workforce
MK Stalin has done well to hold a meeting of the chief ministers of South Indian states, who stand to lose out on representation in Parliament, relative to North Indian states, in case fresh delimitation of constituencies is carried out on the basis the population figures generated by the next Census.
The meeting concluded with a unanimous demand to the Centre to freeze the existing allocation of Lok Sabha seats among states for another 25 years.
Democracy deficit
This raises the valid concern that such a move would lead to a democracy deficit. After all, it is fair to expect every citizen of India to have equal representation in Parliament.
The principle of equality of franchise for all citizens, regardless of gender, class, faith, educational status, region and language, would appear to be vitiated if the number of people represented by one seat in Parliament was different for different states.
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The essential rationale for periodic conduct of the delimitation exercise is to secure this equality of franchise, after the population has risen with the passage of time. By freezing the total number of seats in Parliament, and, alongside, the allocation of those seats among different states, based on the 1971 Census and the share of each state in the aggregate national population, it would seem to reduce the voting power of the people of the states where the population has since grown more than in other states. Would this not be grossly unfair?
Diverse, distinct identities
It would be, if all Indian states had exactly similar people, that is, the people differed only in terms of where they resided, but otherwise were the same, meaning they spoke the same language, followed the same religion, ate the same food, had similar levels of engagement with the outside world, were culturally homogeneous.
But the people of India are not homogeneous. They are very diverse, have distinct cultural identities, have different histories, have different demographic characteristics and different areas of comparative advantage in the production of goods and services, even when they share cultural and political unity at a higher level.
The Constitution says India is a Union of states. However, the states do have their own areas of legislative competence, laid out in the State list of the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution. They have certain autonomous areas of taxation, even after ceding and pooling much of their taxation powers for the sake of creating the Goods and Services Tax (GST).
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Federal cohesion
The cultural diversity of Indian states is a source of collective greatness, but also can be a source of prickliness, if not schism, if there is real or perceived affront to the cultural integrity of any state. India is better described as being quasi-federal, rather than as unitary, in its political structure.
Federal cohesion thus presents itself as a major factor in determining each state’s representation in Parliament, in addition to the equality of franchise. Balancing these two calls for some give on the part of equality of franchise between states.
In fact, India already does privilege the principle of federal cohesion at the expense of equality of franchise. The tiny states of the Northeast, Goa and Lakshadweep have more Members of Parliament per capita than the larger states.
American example
This is not unique to India, either. Most federal polities tend to have some arrangement or the other to give their smaller units greater say in the affairs of the collective than is strictly warranted on the basis of the principle, one man, one vote.
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In the US, for example, the 50 states of differing population sizes have two representatives each in the Senate. The size of the electoral college of each state for electing the president is equal to the strength of the congressional delegation from that state, that is the number of Representatives from that state in the House of Representatives plus the number of senators from that state, which is two.
The House seats are allocated in proportion to the state’s population. Adding a constant 2 to that population share, regardless of the size of the state, increases the number of electoral college votes from a small state, and pushes down the number of electoral college votes from large states, in comparison with strict proportion of the population.
How EU does it
The size of the contingent to the European Parliament from each constituent member of the European Union is determined on the basis of a principle they call ‘degressive proportionality.’ Progressive taxation, we understand, means that the higher the income, the higher the rate of tax.
Here, ‘degressive’, stands in for the opposite of progressive as in progressive taxation. That is, the principle of ‘degressive proportionality’ gives smaller states more members than their share in the total EU population, while reducing the members allotted to large states below their population share.
In other words, democracy entails representational justice on considerations beyond equality of franchise among the constituent units of a heterogenous polity, according to the revealed practice of such polities around the world. The South is perfectly justified in demanding that fresh delimitation should not depress their collective voice in national decision-making.
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Working together
At the same time, South Indian politicians should appreciate that India works best as a collective whole, with the South, which has made relatively more social progress, and therefore, registered greater advance in stabilising the population than the North, working together with the parts of the nation that lag in the demographic transition.
The regionally uneven pace of India’s demographic transition means that, for the economy as a whole, the demographic dividend would operate over an extended period, longer than in the case of smaller, more homogeneous nations with an even pace of the demographic transition across society.
By the demographic transition, of course, we mean the sequence of changes to the birth and death rates and improvement in living standards that together increase a society’s output for a while before the population ages, and fewer young people replace those retiring from work or life, bringing on population decline.
Dependency ratio
In the beginning of the transition, when people have fewer children, and healthy life extends the productive years, the proportion falls, of the very young and the old, constituting the dependents, those who do not earn themselves but depend on the earnings of the working-age population. This also pushes up the proportion of workers in the overall population, so that even without any rise in productivity, just with a rise in the proportion of those who work and a fall in the proportion of those who do not earn, total output goes up.
The lowering of the dependency ratio also allows society to save more, enabling larger investment, raising the productivity per worker. That accelerates the pace of output growth further. The next phase of the demographic transition is women joining the workforce in larger numbers, to reduce the dependency ratio further.
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Economic symbiosis
Finally, everyone grows old and sees the population fail to grow sufficiently to supply enough new workers or enough young people of reproductive age to replace the elders moving into retirement, from work and, eventually, life, leading to population decline, as we see in the rich world, and in China, whose tough birth control policies have led to the nation growing old before it became rich.
The relatively more prosperous South would find able-bodied talent to fill its workforce in the relatively young population of the North. The North and the South coexist in economic symbiosis, not just in a shared culture that welds the nation together, notwithstanding the diversity within it.
The point is to strengthen that cohesion, not dilute it by placing undue weightage on just population in the process of determining of the nation’s affairs.
(The Federal seeks to present views and opinions from all sides of the spectrum. The information, ideas or opinions in the article are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Federal.)
