Bye-elections to 12 Rajya Sabha seats across nine states will take place on September 3, the Election Commission said on Wednesday. Votes will be counted on the same day.

The total number of seats in the Upper House of Parliament is 245, but the current strength is 225 due to 20 vacancies. The number required to achieve the majority is currently 113.

Telangana will vote for one seat that fell vacant when former Bharat Rashtra Samiti member K Keshava Rao resigned on July 5 to rejoin the Congress.

In Odisha, the seat became vacant when former Biju Janata Dal member Mamata Mohanta resigned on July 31 and joined the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The remaining 10 seats fell vacant after Rajya Sabha MPs won the 2024 Lok Sabha elections to become members of the Lower House.

This includes the seats of BJP’s Sarbananda Sonowal and Kamakhya Prasad Tasa in Assam, Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Misa Bharti and BJP MP Vivek Thakur in Bihar, and Congress’ Deepender Singh Hooda in Haryana.

Other seats that fell vacant are those of BJP MP Udayanraje Bhosale and Union minister Piyush Goyal in Maharashtra, Congress leader KC Venugopal in Rajasthan and Union minister Jyotiraditya Scindia in Madhya Pradesh.

BJP MP Biplab Kumar Deb’s seat from Tripura also became vacant after he won the general election.

The BJP is the largest party in the Rajya Sabha currently with 87 MPs, according to the Rajya Sabha website. The ruling National Democratic Alliance is currently short of the majority mark in the Upper House.

The Opposition INDIA bloc has 87 members in the Rajya Sabha. While 26 of them are of the Congress, the Trinamool Congress has 13 members. The Aam Aadmi Party and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam have 10 members each in the Upper House.

The rest of the MPs are either non-aligned nominated members or independent members, or belong to parties that are neither part of the NDA nor the INDIA bloc. The NDA government, however, can get bills passed with their support.