Six of India's 28 States Have a Second House, From Uttar Pradesh's 100-Seat Legislative Council to Telangana's 40, and Article 169 Lets Parliament Add or Abolish One

Six of India’s 28 states have a second legislative chamber, the Legislative Council, called the Vidhan Parishad in Hindi and Marathi. They are Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh, and the Third Schedule of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 gives their councils 426 seats between them, from 100 in Uttar Pradesh to 40 in Telangana. The other 22 states have a Legislative Assembly alone.

Article 168 of the Constitution lets a state have either one House or two. Where it has two, clause (2) names them the Legislative Council and the Legislative Assembly. The Legislative Department’s pocket edition of the Constitution, updated to May 2022, names seven states in clause (1)(a). Six have working councils. Madhya Pradesh, added by the Seventh Amendment from 1 November 1956, does not, and none of the texts opened for this article says why. PRS Legislative Research’s 2021 list of states with councils leaves it out, although the Third Schedule still allots it 90 seats.

Six councils and 426 seats

The 1950 Act fixes each council’s total and splits it among five groups of members.

The state legislatures’ own publications agree where they give a split. Karnataka’s handbook for Council members (September 2018) lists 25 elected by MLAs, 25 by local bodies, 7 each by graduates and teachers, and 11 nominated. The Maharashtra Legislature Secretariat’s 2015 paper gives 30, 22, 7, 7 and 12. Andhra Pradesh’s row comes from an amending Act that received assent on 30 March 2015. It raised the council from 50 seats to 58 and left its start date to a government notification. The copy of the 1950 Act tuput could open still shows 50, so 58 is the figure Parliament set in 2015, and tuput could not check it against a current consolidated text.

Article 171(1) caps a council at one third of its Assembly’s strength and sets a floor of 40 members, so Telangana’s council sits exactly on the floor. The Seventh Amendment raised the cap from one fourth with effect from 1 November 1956. Maharashtra’s Assembly has 288 seats, which would allow a council of 96, and the council has 78, the Secretariat’s paper notes. Parliament, not the state, sets the figure by law under Article 171(2). Uttar Pradesh’s council fell from 108 seats to 100 in November 2000, when Uttarakhand was carved out of the state, the council’s own history page records.

Five ways to get a seat

Article 171(3) divides a council into fractions, “as nearly as may be”. Five groups share the seats.

• One third is elected by members of municipalities, district boards and other local bodies that Parliament lists. The Fourth Schedule of the 1950 Act does the listing state by state. Karnataka’s names eight kinds of body, from city municipal corporations to grama panchayats (village councils), and Uttar Pradesh’s names six, among them municipal corporations and kshettra panchayats (block councils).
• One twelfth is elected by graduates who have held their degree for at least three years and live in the state.
• One twelfth is elected by teachers who have taught for at least three years in an educational institution no lower than a secondary school.
• One third is elected by the MLAs of the Assembly, who must choose people who are not themselves members of the Assembly.
• The rest are nominated by the Governor from people with special knowledge or practical experience of literature, science, art, the co-operative movement and social service. Our guide to what a Governor does covers the office.

The four elected groups vote under Article 171(4) by the single transferable vote. Voters rank candidates in order of preference, and a winner’s surplus votes pass to the voters’ next choices. The seats for local bodies, graduates and teachers go to territorial constituencies. Maharashtra’s seven graduates’ constituencies, set by a 1983 order, are Mumbai, Konkan, Pune, Nashik, Aurangabad, Amravati and Nagpur, one seat each, the Secretariat’s paper says.

A member must be at least 30 years old, five years above the minimum for an MLA under Article 173. The council is never dissolved. Under Article 172(2), as nearly as possible one third of its members retire every second year, which makes a full term six years. The members choose their own Chairman and Deputy Chairman under Article 182.

What a council can do, and where the Assembly decides

Ordinary Bills can start in either House under Article 196. Article 197 then limits the council. If it rejects a Bill the Assembly has passed, sits on it for more than three months or amends it in a way the Assembly refuses, the Assembly can pass the Bill again. The council then has one month. Whether it rejects the Bill again, lets the month pass or amends it again, the Bill counts as passed in the Assembly’s version, with only the council amendments the Assembly accepted. A council can therefore hold an ordinary Bill for three months and, after the Assembly’s second vote, one month more. Unlike the Rajya Sabha, which is covered in our guide to how the Rajya Sabha works, a state council has no joint sitting with the Assembly to settle a dispute.

Money Bills, which deal with taxes, borrowing and spending from the state’s funds, cannot start in a council under Article 198. The council has 14 days to return one with recommendations, and the Assembly may accept or reject any of them. After 14 days the Bill counts as passed. The demands for grants in the budget go to the Assembly alone under Article 203(2), a process explained in how a state budget works. The Council of Ministers answers only to the Assembly under Article 164(2), so a council cannot bring a government down.

Council members also have no vote in the elections for the President or the Rajya Sabha. The President’s electoral college includes the elected members of state Assemblies under Article 54, and Article 80(4) has Assembly members elect the state’s Rajya Sabha members. How India elects its President sets out the arithmetic.

One rule favours the council. A Bill pending in the Assembly lapses when the Assembly is dissolved, but under Article 196(4) a Bill that is pending in the council and has not been passed by the Assembly does not.

The Maharashtra Secretariat’s paper records a case from 2003. The council returned the Appropriation Bill with recommendations on 10 April 2003, after the Assembly had adjourned, and the Assembly held a one-day special session on 8 May 2003 to pass the Bill with them.

How councils were created, scrapped and brought back

The Government of India Act, 1935 introduced second chambers in some provinces, the Maharashtra Secretariat says. When the Constituent Assembly took up the clause on 6 January 1949, it rejected a proposal that would have let each state choose its own structure. The chairman of the Drafting Committee moved a list of states with two Houses and explained that it named only states that had agreed to a second chamber. The 1950 text listed Bihar, Bombay, Madras, Punjab, the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) and West Bengal.

Article 169 now sets the way to change that list. A state Assembly passes a resolution by a majority of its total membership and by at least two thirds of the members present and voting. Parliament then makes a law to create or abolish the council. Article 169(3) says such a law is not an amendment for the purposes of Article 368, so it does not follow the route described in how the Constitution is amended.

The dates in the Constitution’s footnotes and PRS’s 2021 survey give this record:

• 1 November 1956: Mysore, now Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh join the Article 168 list.
• 1958: Parliament creates the Andhra Pradesh council, according to PRS.
• 1 August 1969: West Bengal’s council is abolished.
• 7 January 1970: Punjab’s council is abolished.
• 1 June 1985: Andhra Pradesh’s council is abolished.
• 1 November 1986: Tamil Nadu’s council is abolished.
• 30 March 2007: Andhra Pradesh’s council is revived.
• 2 June 2014: Telangana is named in Article 168 as the state comes into being.
• 31 October 2019: the 36-seat Jammu and Kashmir council ends under section 57 of the Reorganisation Act, and Bills pending in it lapse.

Tamil Nadu tried to return. Its Assembly resolved on 12 April 2010 to re-create a council, and Parliament passed the Tamil Nadu Legislative Council Act, 2010. The Act needed a presidential order to add the state to Article 168. The order was never issued. On 7 June 2011 the Assembly withdrew its decision, and a Repeal Bill was introduced in the Rajya Sabha on 4 May 2012. PRS’s tracker lists no later stage.

Proposals still waiting for Parliament

Three more Assemblies have asked for councils. Rajasthan’s resolved on 18 April 2012 for a council of 66 members, and a Bill reached the Rajya Sabha on 6 August 2013. Assam’s resolved on 14 July 2013 for 42 seats, split 14, 4, 4, 14 and 6 across the same five groups, and its Bill came to the Rajya Sabha in December 2013. Standing committees reported on the two Bills on 9 December 2013 and 17 February 2014, and PRS’s trackers list no later stage. PRS said in May 2021 that both were still pending. West Bengal’s Assembly voted on 6 July 2021, with 196 members for and 69 against among the 265 present, to ask for a council.

Andhra Pradesh went the other way. After its Council sent three Bills on the state’s capital to a select committee in 2020, according to PRS, the Assembly adopted a resolution on 27 January 2020 to abolish it. On 23 November 2021 the Assembly withdrew that resolution. The state’s Minister for Legislative Affairs told the House that the earlier resolution had gone to the Union Home Ministry and drawn no response, Deccan Herald reported.

The case for and against a second house

The argument is as old as the Constitution. In the Constituent Assembly, Kuladhar Chaliha called a second chamber “nothing but a clog in the way of progressive legislation”, and Krishnaswami Bharati replied that its purpose was “to prevent or check hasty legislation”, the Maharashtra Secretariat’s paper records from the Assembly’s debates.

The paper’s author, the Secretariat’s Principal Secretary, argued in 2015 that the council’s job is to revise Bills and that its worth shows in how many of its amendments the Assembly accepts. He also set out the critics’ points, that a council is conservative, costly and not directly elected, and answered each.

C. V. Madhukar, writing in the Indian Express in April 2010 in a piece PRS reproduced, set out the case the Andhra Pradesh government made to a parliamentary standing committee when it revived its council in 2006. A council, the state argued, gives a voice to under-represented sections of society and acts as a revising chamber. Opponents say the answer to a crowded Assembly timetable is more sitting days, and Madhukar noted that the days state assemblies meet had fallen steadily for several years. He saw no obvious present-day justification for reserving seats for graduates and teachers, and wrote that there is little research or evidence on whether councils widen representation.

The next council votes are on 23 October 2026

Article 170 says Assembly seat totals need not be readjusted until figures from the first census after 2026 are published, and each council’s one-third ceiling follows its Assembly’s total.

The Election Commission announced on 22 September 2026, Deccan Chronicle reported, that 28 graduates’ and teachers’ seats in four councils will be filled on 23 October 2026. Bihar votes for 8 seats, Karnataka for 4, Maharashtra for 5 and Uttar Pradesh for 11, as members retire in November and December.