1. Head of the Federation :
(1) The Head of the Federation shall be the President (Rashtrapati) to be elected as provided below:
(2) The election shall be by an electoral college consisting of—
(а) the members of both Houses of Parliament of the Federation, and
(b) the members of the Legislatures of all the units or, where a Legislature is bicameral, the members of the Lower House thereof.
In order to secure uniformity in the scale of representation of the units, the votes of the unit Legislatures shall be weighted in proportion to the population of the units concerned.
Explanation. —A unit means a Province or Indian State which returns in its own individual right members to the Federal Parliament In Indian States which are grouped together for the purpose of returning representatives to the Council of States, a unit means the group so formed and the Legislature of the unit means the Legislatures of all the States in that group.
(3) The election of the President shall be by secret ballot and on the system of proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote.
(4) Subject to the above provisions, elections for the office of President shall be regulated by Act of the Federal Parliament
[Note: The provision about weighting of the votes according to the population of the units is necessary to prevent the swamping of the votes of a large unit by those of a much smaller unit which may happen to have a relatively large legislature. The mode of weighting may be illustrated thus. In a legislature where each legislator represents 1 lakh (1,00,000) of the population, his vote shall count as equivalent to 100, that is, 1 for each 1,000 of the population; and where the legislature is such that the legislator represents 10,000 of the population, his vote shall count as equivalent to 10 on the same scale.]