Akhilesh Yadav demands Census before implementing reservation of seats for women in Parliament and Assemblies

Lucknow: A day after after Prime Minister Narendra Modi remarked that the budget session of the Parliament has been extended for three days to enable implementation of the Women's Reservation law enacted in 2023 providing 33 per cent reservation for women in 2029, Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav questioned the basis of the proposed reservation saying that a new census was essential before the same.

In a post on his official 'X' handle on Sunday, Yadav said that any policy must be based on correct statistics and not old figures.

The SP MP said that structure of the Women's Reservation would be 'faulty' if it was based on the old figures of 2011 Census.

''In fact, the very basis of the Bill is faulty, if the basis of reservation is one third of the total seats then it will mean that it's a matter of arithmetic and the basis of arithmetic is numbers,'' he added.

''How can good crop grow on defective land. We demand that the issue of women's reservation be taken up after a new Census", Yadav said.

He said that the BJP government didn't want to give adequate reservation to the women and was 'cheating' them.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju had on Thursday informed the Rajya Sabha that the House would meet soon to discuss the important Bill.

The Women's Reservation Bill (Mari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam) Amendment Act was passed by the Parliament in 2023 providing for 33 per cent seats for women in Lok Sabha, state assemblies and Delhi Assembly for 15 years. 

It's implementation, however, was linked to the first census and delimitation exercise conducted after it's enactment.