India, March 25 -- The plan to amend the women's reservation bill - delinking it from the ongoing Census and the delimitation exercise that would have followed - is welcome, irrespective of the motivations. Timing may well explain the haste: Work on the first phase of the Census starts next month. Delimitation can only happen after the entire exercise is complete. Under the terms of the existing law, which lists the Census and delimitation as pre-requisites, implementing the quota ahead of the 2029 Lok Sabha election would have been difficult, if not impossible. The widely reported (but, as yet, unconfirmed) plan is to pass an amendment increasing the size of the Lok Sabha and legislatures by 50% and use a lottery to identify the seats to be reserved for women. If the amendment passes, the five state elections due in early 2027 (Uttarakhand, Goa, Punjab, Manipur, and Uttar Pradesh) could include reservations for women in enlarged assemblies. The plan includes keeping the proportional representation of states constant in the enlarged Lok Sabha. This may also require changing the terms of the delimitation commission, and perhaps another constitutional amendment (in Article 82, which mandates adjusting Lok Sabha seats after every census). After all, keeping the current proportion of state seats in the Lok Sabha unchanged would mean that a vote in Kerala or Tamil Nadu carries more weightage than a vote in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar. Then, this could address the concerns of the southern states, which worry that a delimitation based on current population will penalise them (in terms of proportional representation in the Lok Sabha) for meeting the national imperative of population control better than some northern and eastern states. Still, ongoing conversations between the government and all political parties make it clear that the plan is very much a work in progress. There has been talk of using the 2011 Census as a base (the current strength is based on the 1971 Census), but this would require changing the proportional representation of the states, and will likely run into stiff opposition. No party will likely oppose the plan to bring forward the reservation - many had asked for this when the original bill was passed - that increases women's representation in the Lok Sabha from the current 13.6% to 33.33%. Will it benefit any particular political dispensation? Women's votes have played a key role in deciding many recent state elections, and the BJP has won more of those than the Opposition. This befits a party that describes women as one of the only four castes it recognises, with the other three being the poor, the young, and farmers....