The Supreme Court has dismissed a petition seeking an increase in assembly constituencies in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The plea, filed by Professor K. Purushottam Reddy, urged the Centre to implement Section 26 of the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014, which proposed raising the number of assembly seats from 175 to 225 in Andhra Pradesh and from 119 to 153 in Telangana.

A bench comprising Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi ruled that no delimitation can take place before the first census conducted after 2026, as per the constitutional bar under Article 170(3). The Court made it clear that Section 26 of the Reorganisation Act cannot override this constitutional restriction.

The petitioner had argued that delimitation was already carried out in Jammu and Kashmir in 2022 and that excluding Andhra Pradesh and Telangana from the same process amounted to discrimination. The Court rejected this comparison, stating that Jammu and Kashmir, being a Union Territory, operates under a different legal framework and cannot be equated with full-fledged states.

The bench further noted that entertaining such demands could lead to similar petitions from other states, which would go against the constitutional freeze currently in place. With this decision, the current assembly seat structure in both Andhra Pradesh and Telangana will remain unchanged until after the post-2026 census.

This ruling reaffirms the constitutional timeline for delimitation and puts an end, at least for now, to efforts seeking early restructuring of political representation in the two states.