458 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
ARTICLE 44
- Mr. Vice-President : We shall now take up article 44. The motion is : The article 44 form part of the Constitution. I am going to call over the amendments one by one.
Amendment No. 1075—Dr. Ambedkar.
The Honourable Dr. B. R. Ambedkar :
Sir, I move—
“That in sub-clause (c) of clause (2) of article 44, for the words “such member” the words “the elected members of both Houses of Parliament” be substituted.”
Before proceeding to give the reasons for the amendment I would like with your permission to go back for a minute to clause (2) of this article and explain the scheme as set out in sub-clauses (a) and (b) of that clause. Honourable Members will see that the President is to be elected by elected Members of the Lower House of each State Legislature and by elected Members of both Houses of Parliament— the two to form a single electoral college. Sub-clause (1) of article
44 says that as far as practicable there shall be uniformity in the scale of representation of the different States in the election of the President. It would have been possible to achieve this uniformity by the simple method of assigning each member of the electoral college one vote. But this is not possible because of the disparity between the members of the Legislature and their ratio to population that exists between the different classes of States. In the case of States in Part I of the First Schedule, article 149(3)fixes the scale of representation—one representative for every one lakh of population. In the case of States in Part III, no such scale is laid down. The scale may vary from State to State. In one State, it may be one representative for every 10,000 population. In another, it may be one for every 20,000. That being the position, the value of the votes cast in the election of the President by the members of the Slate Legislatures cannot be measured by the simple rule of assigning one vote one value. The problem, therefore, is how to bring about uniformity in the value of the votes cast by members who do not represent the same electoral unit. The formula adopted to obtain the value of a vote cast by an elected member of the Legislature of a State is to divide the population of that State by the total number of elected members of the Legislature of that State ; and to divide the
*CAD. Vol. VII. 13th December 1948, pp. 1001-03.