The 84th Constitutional Amendment Act, 2001, is a legislative provision that primarily deals with the freeze on the delimitation of parliamentary and assembly constituencies in India. It was enacted to address the political problem where states that had successfully implemented family planning and population control measures feared losing their political representation in the Lok Sabha to states with higher population growth.
The Act, which received the President's assent on February 21, 2002, extended the freeze originally imposed by the 42nd Amendment Act, 1976. Its key mechanism was to amend Article 55, Article 81, Article 82, Article 170, and Article 330 of the Constitution, substituting the year "2000" with "2026" in the relevant provisos. This provision effectively froze the total number of seats allocated to each state in the Lok Sabha and State Legislative Assemblies based on the 1971 Census until the first census taken after the year 2026.
However, the Act did not impose a complete freeze. It permitted the readjustment and rationalisation of territorial constituencies within a state, without altering the total number of seats, based on the population figures of the 1991 Census. This provision was later amended by the 87th Amendment Act, 2003, which changed the basis for this intra-state delimitation to the 2001 Census. The Act is closely connected to the constitutional mandate for delimitation under Article 82 and Article 170. The expiration of the freeze in 2026 is currently a major point of discussion in Indian polity, with proposals like the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026, being introduced to address the post-freeze scenario.