New Delhi: Is the Indian political system ignoring cities in favour of villages? Legislators from three parties said India’s cities are politically neglected because the electoral map still favours rural constituencies, leaving lawmakers little incentive to fix urban governance. They were speaking at a panel discussion at the Charcha 2026 convention Tuesday.
K. T. Rama Rao of the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), MLA from Sircilla and former Telangana urban development minister, described a “reverse incentive” to invest in cities. His party won only two seats in Hyderabad in 2014 but formed the state government, he said, and swept the city in 2023 but lost power. “In 2023, we won all the seats in Hyderabad. Yet we lost,” he said.
S. Niranjan Reddy, a YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) Rajya Sabha legislator from Andhra Pradesh, put the arithmetic plainly at Charcha 2026. In a state, “80 percent of the seats, 90 percent of the seats are coming from rural areas,” he said, even where half the population lived in towns. “So there’s no incentive for the politicians to act.” When he raised urban planning and city funding in Parliament, he said, the reply was that these were “state subjects”.
The imbalance is rooted in a delimitation freeze. Parliamentary and Assembly seats have not been redrawn on fresh population data since the 1971 census, held in place by constitutional amendments in 1976 and 2001 until now. An attempt to restart the exercise and expand the Lok Sabha—the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill—was defeated in the Lok Sabha in April, short of a two-thirds majority.
As a result, fast-growing cities have remained under-represented; southern states, which slowed their population growth, also fear losing seats to the north. “We have not had any delimitation in the last 50 years,” Niranjan Reddy said at Charcha 2026.
The “state subjects” hurdle has a longer history. The 74th Constitutional Amendment of 1992 was meant to empower elected city governments, but most powers and finances still rest with the states, leaving mayors and municipal bodies with limited control over planning and services.
The panel, ‘Sheheron pe Charcha: A Cross-Party Dialogue with Legislators on How to Make India’s Cities Work for Its People’, was hosted by the urban-governance NGO Janaagraha at Charcha 2026, convened by The/Nudge Foundation, and moderated by Janaagraha chief executive Srikanth Viswanathan at the India Habitat Centre.
Viswanathan said India would be mostly urban “in the next 10-20 years”, and that on measures from social security to health, “the urban poor probably have it a lot worse than the rural poor”. No country, he said, had “achieved higher income status and accomplished human development goals without urbanising well”. He asked why a country that could “send rockets to the moon” was “not able to clear garbage off your streets”.
Mahua Maji, a Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) Rajya Sabha legislator, said the issues she heard most in Ranchi were waterlogging and pollution—roads raised so far above adjoining houses that water drained into homes, breeding mosquitoes and disease.
Rama Rao said citizens brought day-to-day complaints while long-term planning was left to administrators, and that the answer to rapid urbanisation lay in connectivity: A resident of Nirmal, about 200 km away, should be able to “hop onto a train, come to Hyderabad, get his work done, go back”. He said educated rural youth no longer wanted to farm—”nobody wants to go in there”—and sought jobs in industry or cities instead.
Niranjan Reddy said migration was often not driven by work. Only about 25 percent people aged 20 to 39 were getting jobs, he said, while others moved for education, healthcare or status—”not necessarily related to productivity”.
He said smaller towns that had become urban in character were still classified, and funded, as rural, and that residents had to accept paying for services: “If we want good civic services from the municipality, we should also be able to pay for it.”
Viswanathan said the funding pipeline reinforced the divide: Social-sector schemes were aimed at villages, but infrastructure schemes flowed mainly to cities.
The session was built around a longer question—what life in an Indian city should look like by 2047.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
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