EC proposes to reserve four more Assembly seats in Assam for STs, SCs

The EC draft of delimitation proposes to reserve 19 assembly and two parliamentary seats for STs, and nine assembly and one parliamentary seats for SCs.

The draft proposal for delimitation exercise in Assam released by the Election Commission of India (ECI) on Tuesday proposed to increase the number of Assembly constituencies reserved for the Scheduled Tribes (ST) and Scheduled Castes (SC) to 19 and nine, respectively.

The delimitation exercise, which would only redraw the boundaries of the 126 Assembly constituencies and 14 Lok Sabha Constituencies in Assam, proposed to increase the Assembly seats reserved for the STs from 16 at present to 19 and the same for the SCs from eight to nine.

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The draft sought to increase the number of Assembly constituencies in the Bodoland region from 16 at present to 19, by redrawing the boundaries. Similarly, it sought to increase one Assembly seat in Autonomous districts in West Karbi Anglong district.

The draft for the delimitation, however, proposed to reserve one out of the 14 Lok Sabha seats for the SCs. The same for the STs, however, would remain unchanged. Two Lok Sabha constituencies, Kokrakhar and Diphu are reserved for the STs at present.

The draft proposal also proposed to name one Lok Sabha constituency as Kaziranga, the national park famous for its one-horned rhinos.

The last delimitation exercise in Assam was carried out in 1976. A new delimitation exercise was supposed to be carried out in 2007 but the same in the state was postponed due to the law and order issues. The ECI, however, resumed the process for the exercise in December last year after being asked by the government.

A team of the ECI headed by Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar visited Assam between March 26 and 28 and held discussions with 11 political parties and 71 other organisations before releasing the draft proposal. The Opposition Congress, however, boycotted the meeting with the ECI despite invitations.

A team of the Commission will again visit the state in July, the ECI said.

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"Efforts have been made to keep all constituencies, as far as practicable, as geographically compact areas, and in delimiting them, regard has been made to the physical features, density of population, existing boundaries of administrative units, facilities of communication and public convenience. Deviation to certain extent from the state and district average has been allowed due to huge inter-district variation in certain cases in terms of factors such as geographical features, density of population, means of communication, public convenience, contiguity of the areas and necessity to avoid breaking of administrative units and as constituencies cannot be delimited having exactly equal population in all cases," the ECI said in a statement.

The delimitation exercise would be carried out on the basis of Census of 2001 as provided in the Article 170 and Article 82 of the Constitution.

The ruling BJP in Assam hoped that by increasing the seats reserved for STs and SCs, the delimitation would increase representations of the ethnic communities and thereby protect their political interests. The Opposition parties, including the Congress, on the other hand, doubted the intention of the exercise.