Amendment of the Constitution: the Article 368 procedure, step by step

Article 368 is the single article, sitting alone in Part XX, that tells Parliament how to change the rest of the Constitution. The Salient Features note on this site already sketches the three routes an amendment can take, and the Supreme Court and Judiciary note already covers what those routes cannot do, the basic structure doctrine from Kesavananda Bharati. This note deliberately does neither. It stays inside Article 368 itself and works through the actual mechanics: where Parliament's power to amend comes from in the first place, the precise sequence a Constitution Amendment Bill follows from introduction to assent, and the exact statutory majorities at each step. Two real past-year questions (2022 and 2024) test exactly this procedural detail, and neither had a dedicated note to prepare from until now.

This chapter's material overlaps with NCERT Class 11, Indian Constitution at Work, Chapter 9 (Constitution as a Living Document). This note goes further than that chapter's coverage.

Where the amending power actually comes from

It is tempting to assume Article 368 has always been the source of Parliament's power to amend the Constitution. For the first 21 years of the Republic, that was not quite true.

Before 1971, Article 368 (then a single, unnumbered provision, not yet split into clauses) did only one thing: it laid down the procedure for amendment, introduction of a Bill, passage by each House with a special majority, ratification for certain provisions. It never actually said Parliament had the power to amend the Constitution. Since "amendment of the Constitution" appears nowhere as a subject in any of the three Seventh Schedule Lists, the accepted account of where that power came from, in this pre-1971 period, was Parliament's residuary power under Article 248, read with Entry 97 of the Union List ("any other matter not enumerated in List II or List III, including any tax not mentioned in either of those Lists"), the same catch-all clause that gives Parliament competence over subjects nobody thought to enumerate. Treat this only as historical background: it describes how lawyers made sense of the gap in the pre-1971 text, not how the Constitution works today.

That gap was closed by the Constitution (Twenty-fourth Amendment) Act, 1971. Section 3 of that Act rewrote Article 368 with effect from 5 November 1971, and in one stroke: inserted a brand-new clause (1) that, for the first time, expressly gives Parliament constituent power; renumbered the old, procedure-only text as clause (2); and made a further change to that clause covered below. The new clause 368(1) reads, verbatim:

"Notwithstanding anything in this Constitution, Parliament may in exercise of its constituent power amend by way of addition, variation or repeal any provision of this Constitution in accordance with the procedure laid down in this article."

So the express grant of amending power is itself a 1971 addition, not part of the original 1950 text. This was not a stray drafting tidy-up. It was Parliament's direct legislative response to Golaknath v State of Punjab (1967), an eleven-judge bench which held, by a 6:5 majority, that a constitutional amendment is "law" within the meaning of Article 13(2), and is therefore just as void as an ordinary statute if it takes away or abridges a Fundamental Right. The 24th Amendment answered Golaknath on two fronts at once: clause (1) asserted, in terms, that Parliament's amending power is a constituent power, not ordinary legislative power, and a new clause 368(3), added by the same amendment, provides that "nothing in article 13 shall apply to any amendment made under this article", directly excluding constitutional amendments from Article 13's reach. Whether that answer itself went too far, and what the Supreme Court did about it two years later in Kesavananda Bharati, belongs to the Supreme Court and Judiciary note's basic structure story, not this one.

The step-by-step procedure

Strip away the surrounding debate and Article 368(2) sets out a clean, four-stage sequence.

1. Introduction

A Constitution Amendment Bill can be introduced in either House of Parliament, the Lok Sabha or the Rajya Sabha, unlike a Money Bill, which under Article 110 can only originate in the Lok Sabha. It can be introduced by a Minister or by a private member; there is no requirement, unlike a Money Bill or any Bill involving expenditure from the Consolidated Fund of India, for the prior recommendation of the President before it is introduced. The President only enters the process at the very end, to give assent, not at the start, to authorise the Bill's introduction.

2. Passage in each House, separately, by special majority

Once introduced, the Bill must be passed by each House separately. There is no sending it back and forth as a single combined vote; the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha each conduct their own vote, and each must clear the same threshold defined in Article 368(2): a majority of the total membership of that House, and, additionally, a majority of not less than two-thirds of the members of that House present and voting. Both conditions have to be satisfied together, total membership is a fixed number regardless of vacancies or absences, so a thin house can make the two-thirds-present-and-voting threshold easy to clear while still failing the total-membership threshold, and a Bill must pass both tests in the Lok Sabha and, independently, both tests again in the Rajya Sabha.

Crucially, if one House passes the Bill and the other rejects it, or the two Houses cannot agree, there is no provision for a joint sitting to resolve the deadlock. This is a genuine, deliberate contrast with the ordinary Bill procedure: Article 108 gives the President the power to summon a joint sitting of both Houses when an ordinary Bill is rejected by one House, or the Houses finally disagree on amendments, or six months pass without the second House acting on it, but Article 108(1)'s own proviso already carves out Money Bills from that mechanism, and Article 368's self-contained procedure, requiring passage by each House separately by a special majority, simply has no equivalent joint-sitting escape valve built into it. A Constitution Amendment Bill that one House rejects, or lets lapse, dies there.

3. Ratification by the states, for a defined subset of provisions

For most of the Constitution, passage by both Houses with the special majority is the end of the parliamentary process. But Article 368(2)'s proviso carves out a specific list of federal provisions where an additional step is required: ratification by the Legislatures of not less than one-half of the States, by resolutions passed to that effect, before the Bill is presented to the President. The categories the proviso names are:

• the manner of election of the President (Articles 54 and 55);
• the extent of the executive power of the Union and of the states (Articles 73 and 162);
• the Supreme Court (Chapter IV of Part V) and the High Courts (Chapter V of Part VI, and, since the 101st Amendment, 2016, the GST Council under Article 279A);
• the distribution of legislative powers between the Union and the states (Chapter I of Part XI) and any of the Lists in the Seventh Schedule;
• the representation of states in Parliament; and
• Article 368 itself.

Notice the bar here is genuinely lower than the bar Parliament clears for itself. The Constitution's text requires only that the state legislatures pass "resolutions to that effect", with no special-majority language attached, unlike the explicit two-thirds-plus-total-membership formula it spells out for Parliament in the same clause. Where the Constitution wanted a special majority, it said so; its silence on the state resolutions is read as leaving an ordinary, simple majority sufficient in each ratifying state legislature. Half the states agreeing is enough, whatever margin they agree by.

4. Presidential assent

Once the Bill has cleared Parliament (and state ratification, where the proviso applies), it is presented to the President. Here Article 368(2), as substituted by the 24th Amendment, leaves no discretion at all: "it shall be presented to the President who shall give his assent to the Bill and thereupon the Constitution shall stand amended in accordance with the terms of the Bill." Before the 1971 amendment, this clause did not exist in that form, and the President's position was comparatively closer to an ordinary Bill under Article 111 (assent, withholding assent, or, for a non-Money Bill, returning it once for reconsideration). The 24th Amendment removed that room entirely for Constitution Amendment Bills specifically: assent is not a matter of the President's judgement, it is compelled by the word "shall" the moment the Bill has been validly passed.

Matching a real amendment to its route

The Salient Features note already names the three routes; what earns its place here is checking each one against a real amendment that actually used it.

Simple majority, outside Article 368 altogether. Article 4(2) says explicitly that a law made under Articles 2 or 3, forming a new state, altering a state's boundaries, area or name, "shall not be deemed to be an amendment of this Constitution for the purposes of article 368." The Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014 (Act No. 6 of 2014), which carved Telangana out of Andhra Pradesh under Article 3, is a real, recent example: an ordinary law, passed by simple majority, that reshaped a state's boundaries without touching Article 368's procedure at all.

Special majority alone, no ratification. The bulk of the Constitution, including Fundamental Rights, falls outside the proviso's list, so it needs only the Article 368(2) special majority in each House. The Constitution (Forty-fourth Amendment) Act, 1978, which repealed the right to property as a Fundamental Right under Article 19(1)(f) and the original Article 31, and re-enacted it in weaker form as the ordinary legal right in the new Article 300A, is a clean example: a change squarely inside Part III, needing only the special majority, since property was never one of the proviso's named federal categories.

Special majority plus state ratification. The clearest, most directly checkable example is one this site has already verified elsewhere: the Constitution (Ninety-ninth Amendment) Act, 2014, which inserted Articles 124A to 124C to create the National Judicial Appointments Commission. Because it restructured how judges of the Supreme Court and the High Courts are appointed, squarely within Chapter IV of Part V and Chapter V of Part VI, it needed, and received, ratification by more than half the state legislatures before being presented for assent. (What the Supreme Court then did to that amendment in SCAORA v Union of India (2015) is the Supreme Court and Judiciary note's story, not this one; here it matters only as a correctly ratified example of this third route.)

The exam angle: the trap UPSC actually tests

Three failure modes account for most wrong answers on this chapter, and all three showed up, almost verbatim, in real Prelims questions in 2022 and 2024.

Assuming prior Presidential recommendation is needed to introduce the Bill. It is not, for any Constitution Amendment Bill, Minister-sponsored or private member. Confusing this with the Money Bill rule (Article 117, prior Presidential recommendation required) is the single most common trap here.

Assuming a joint sitting can break a deadlock. It cannot. Article 108's joint sitting mechanism belongs to the ordinary Bill procedure under Articles 107 and 108; Article 368 is a self-contained procedure that requires separate passage in each House by special majority, with nothing resembling Article 108's escape valve. A statement claiming a Constitution Amendment Bill can be resolved by joint sitting is always false.

Assuming the President retains some discretion over assent. Since the 24th Amendment, 1971, this is false as a matter of the constitutional text itself: the word "shall" in Article 368(2) leaves no room for withholding assent or returning the Bill, a genuinely sharper rule than the more debated, largely conventional limits on the President's discretion over an ordinary Bill.

A fourth, subtler trap is mismatching an amendment to its route, assuming every "important-sounding" amendment must have needed state ratification, when in fact only a specific, named list of federal provisions triggers that requirement; the 44th Amendment's property-rights change above is a useful check on that instinct, since it touched Fundamental Rights directly and still needed no ratification at all.

How many amendments so far

As of the Constitution (One Hundred and Sixth Amendment) Act, 2023 (the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, reserving seats for women in the Lok Sabha and state Legislative Assemblies), the most recent amendment actually enacted, the Constitution has been amended 106 times since 1950. Treat this as a number that moves: further Constitution Amendment Bills reach Parliament regularly (this note was last checked against that count on 26 August 2026), and by the time you are reading this, one or more may have been passed. The overwhelming majority of those 106 amendments used the special-majority-alone route above; only a distinctly small minority, touching the federal provisions named in Article 368(2)'s proviso, needed the additional step of state ratification.

Quick revision points

• Article 368(1)'s express grant of constituent power was inserted by the 24th Amendment, 1971 (with effect from 5 November 1971); before that, Article 368 laid down only the procedure, and the amending power was traced to the residuary power under Article 248 read with Entry 97 of the Union List.
• A Constitution Amendment Bill: can be introduced in either House, by a Minister or a private member, with no prior Presidential recommendation needed.
• Must be passed in each House separately by a special majority: a majority of the total membership of that House, and not less than two-thirds of members present and voting. No joint sitting exists to resolve disagreement between the Houses (contrast Article 108, which does allow one for ordinary Bills).
• For amendments touching federal provisions (election of the President, the Supreme Court and High Courts, distribution of legislative powers, representation of states in Parliament, Article 368 itself, among others), an added step: ** ratification by at least half the state legislatures**, by ordinary/simple majority resolutions, before presentation to the President.
• Presidential assent is mandatory since the 24th Amendment, 1971, Article 368(2) uses "shall give his assent", with no power to withhold or return the Bill.
• Article 368(3): Article 13 does not apply to amendments made under Article 368, a direct reversal of Golaknath (1967). Clauses (4) and (5), added by the 42nd Amendment, 1976 to place amendments beyond judicial review, were themselves struck down by the Supreme Court in Minerva Mills (1980).
• Kesavananda Bharati (1973) held this amending power does not extend to destroying the Constitution's basic structure; full case history and doctrine are in the Supreme Court and Judiciary note, not repeated here.
• 106 amendments as of the 106th Amendment Act, 2023 (checked 26 August 2026), the great majority by special majority alone, a small minority with state ratification.

Once the sequence and the majorities are solid, practising the exact statement-based questions UPSC builds around this chapter, particularly the joint-sitting and mandatory-assent traps, is the fastest way to make them stick.