The Constitution (Eighty-fourth Amendment) Act, 2001, is a constitutional amendment that primarily addresses the delimitation of parliamentary and assembly constituencies in India. It received the President's assent on February 21, 2002. The Act's origin lies in the need to prevent states that successfully implemented population control measures from being politically penalized. The problem it solved was the impending expiration of a freeze on seat allocation, which would have shifted representation away from states with lower population growth.
The key mechanism of the Act was to amend several articles, including Article 55, Article 81, Article 82, and Article 170, by 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. This extension was intended as a motivational measure to encourage state governments to pursue population stabilization.
While the total number of seats was frozen, the Act permitted the readjustment and rationalization of territorial constituencies within a state, without altering the total number of seats, using the population figures of the 1991 Census. This Act directly connects to the 42nd Amendment Act, 1976, which had imposed the original freeze using the 1971 Census figures until 2000. The Act has since been changed: the 87th Amendment Act of 2003 replaced the 1991 Census base for intra-state delimitation with the 2001 Census figures. The core freeze on the total number of seats until after 2026 remains in effect.