Why SC is revisiting a 2003 ruling on two-child norm for panchayat polls

The Supreme Court on Wednesday (November 4) referred its 2003 ruling in Javed v. State of Haryana, which upheld the disqualification of people with more than two children from contesting panchayat elections, to a larger bench for reconsideration. 

A bench comprising Justices P S Narasimha and Alok Aradhe said: “We are of the strong opinion that laws that penalise having more than two children have lost their relevance,” adding that the fear of overpopulation on which these laws rest “has crumbled due to demographic changes in the past few decades”.

“It is high time we recall Javed. We cannot ride into the future on a horse that is dead. It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change,” the bench said.

Background of the case

The case arose from the petitioner, Mangala Bhimrao Ingle, who was elected as the sarpanch of Kakoda gram panchayat in 2022. Her election was challenged on the grounds that she had three children, including a child born in 2014, which was in violation of the Maharashtra Village Panchayats Act, 1959, which disqualifies persons having more than two children.

In October 2024, the Additional Collector disqualified her under Section 14(1)(j-1) of the Act. Her appeal was subsequently dismissed by the Additional Commissioner in April 2025, following which she moved the Bombay High Court.

The High Court upheld those orders in August 2025, holding that the documents including the birth certificates of the three children supported the finding of her disqualification.

The legal framework 

Maharashtra is among the several states that disqualify people from contesting or continuing in local body offices if they have more than two children. The provision was first introduced through a 1995 amendment to the Maharashtra Village Panchayats Act, 1959, as part of a legislative approach to population control.

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Section 14(1)(j-1) of the Act states that a person is disqualified from being elected as a member of a Gram Panchayat if they have more than two children. The carve-out is that a person who has already had more than two children when the amendment came into force is not disqualified, provided that the number of children does not increase thereafter.

Children born in a single delivery within one year of the amendment commencement are also excluded.

If a couple has one child and later has twins or more children in one delivery, they are counted as one for this law. Adopted children are excluded from the definition. 

Similar two-child rules apply to local body elections in Haryana, Rajasthan, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh. 

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What Supreme Court said in Javed v. State of Haryana

The Supreme Court first upheld a two-child disqualification law in Javed v. State of Haryana (2003). The case concerned Section 175(1)(q) of the Haryana Panchayati Raj Act, 1994, which disqualified a person with more than two living children from holding the office of sarpanch, panch, or member of a panchayat samiti or zila parishad.

A three-judge bench held that disqualifying people with more than two living children from panchayat offices was a valid way of encouraging family planning. It said that the restriction did not prevent anyone from having more children but attached an electoral consequence to that choice.

It said, “If anyone chooses to have more living children than two, he is free to do so under the law as it stands now but then he should pay a little price and that is of depriving himself from holding an office in Panchayat in the State of Haryana. There is nothing illegal about it and certainly no unconstitutionality attaches to it.”

On the challenge under Article 21, the bench rejected the claim that personal liberty included a right to procreate without consequence for holding office, noting that it would be “futile to assume or urge that the impugned legislation violates right to life and liberty”.

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The bench also held that the right to contest an election was a statutory right and not a fundamental right and could thus be subjected to legislative conditions. It said the provision “seeks to achieve a laudable purpose — socio-economic welfare and health care of the masses and is consistent with the national population policy. It is not violative of Article 14 of the Constitution.”

What the Supreme Court has said now

The Supreme Court said that the demographic circumstances on which Javed was decided had changed. India’s total fertility rate (TFR) had fallen from 3.0 in 2003 to 1.9 which is below the replacement level, 2.1.

A replacement level is the TFR at which each generation exactly replaces itself, about 2.1 children per woman. Below it, a population shrinks over time and over it, a population grows. 

The court said that ignoring this shift simply because India still has a large population “would be dangerously complacent…the stakes are too high,” adding that “the need of the hour is to have policies in tune with the present realities”.

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The bench also questioned why such restrictions were only applied to elected representatives at the panchayat level but not those who are contesting elections to Parliament or state legislatures. It said that imposing such a measure only on grassroots representatives was “replete with prejudice and preconceived notions”.

It said that the right of representation and the right to hold office under the state are the two most important rights that make up a citizenship. 

In Javed, the top court had said that the disqualification affected men and women equally. The bench disagreed, saying that such a reasoning “does not sit in accordance with the social realities of the country”. Referring to a 2009 study by the Ministry of Panchayat Raj, the bench noted that the two-child norm in a patriarchal society had “tended to weaken the position of women rather than empowering them”.

It held that women could face disqualification because of reproductive decisions over which they may have little or no control. The study had also documented instances of forced abortions, desertion of pregnant wives, and denial of paternity to avoid disqualification.

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The bench further said that the law raised concerns about the right to reproductive autonomy under Article 21. It said: “The choice of whether, when, and how many children to have is a decision of the most intimate and personal character, which must ordinarily remain within the autonomous domain of the individual, free from external coercion.”

It noted that the law wrongly links access to elected office with population control, and unfairly singles out those seeking political representation at the village level, when higher fertility has far more complex causes.

By linking the birth of a third child to electoral disqualification, the law forced a person to make an “unconscionable choice” to choose “between the exercise of their reproductive autonomy and continued participation in democratic governance”. This, they said, impinged on Article 21 of the Constitution.

The bench said that allowing Javed’s reasoning to continue would “exclude an entire class of citizens from political representation on grounds bearing little rational connection to their capacity to hold public office”.

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It said that laws that may have been justified when they were introduced could “become arbitrary and unreasonable” with the passage of time.

The bench also said that the validity of the Maharashtra provision and the ruling in Javed were not directly under challenge before it. However, it said that while courts cannot direct legislatures to repeal or amend laws, they can examine whether their continued operation remains constitutionally sustainable when the circumstances underlying it had already changed.