Daijiworld Media Network – Panaji

Panaji, Sep 10: The long-awaited move to provide political reservation to Scheduled Tribes (ST) in Goa has been pushed back, with the Census Commission of India announcing that no redrawing of electoral boundaries will take place until March 2027.

The BJP-led state government had hoped to introduce four reserved seats for STs in the 40-member Goa Assembly for the 2027 polls. Despite an ST population of nearly 1.5 lakh, no seats are currently reserved for the community.

Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, Mritunjay Kumar Narayan, in a communication to the Goa government, directed that boundaries of administrative units must remain frozen between January 1, 2026, and March 31, 2027, to facilitate the Census exercise. “For Census 2027, boundaries of administrative units will be frozen on December 31, 2025,” he clarified.

Election officials in Goa remained unavailable for comments, but sources confirmed that no delimitation exercise can be undertaken until fresh population data is available post-Census. A delimitation commission will have to be constituted after the enumeration is completed.

Constitutional amendments had already frozen constituency delimitation until 2026. The next exercise will only be possible after Census 2027, which will be conducted in two phases – house-listing operations from April to September 2026, and population enumeration in February–March 2027.

Last month, the Centre notified the Readjustment of Representation of Scheduled Tribes in Assembly Constituencies of Goa Act, 2025, which legally paved the way for ST reservation. Under the Act, the Census Commissioner must establish the ST population based on the latest enumeration, and once notified in the Gazette of India, the Election Commission will amend the Delimitation Order accordingly.

With the Census timeline now fixed, the introduction of ST-reserved seats in Goa will likely only be implemented after 2027, dashing hopes of their inclusion in the upcoming Assembly elections.