Does India Need More States?

Some guy tweeted a pic that captured the fraction of the world’s population (not India’s population, but the entire world’s) living in each state of India:

While most of us wouldn’t have known the actual percentages the way the map shows it, overall, it is hardly surprising to most Indians.

 

Pranay Kotasthane drew an interesting inference from the map. Taking UP as the example, he points out:

“There’s no way an Indian state government with current levels of capacity can provide for 2.5% of humanity.”

He added another very relevant comparison:

“UP, for example, is twice as populous as China's most populous province, Guangdong.”

Therefore, he says:

“We probably need twice the number of states as we currently do.”

 

He then takes an interesting digression into the basis on which the states were created at independence. Yes, on linguistic basis. On that:

“(BR Ambedkar) made the critical distinction between “one language, one state” and “one state, one language” as the two bases for state creation.”

In his book, Thoughts on Linguistic States, Ambedkar had written:

“One language, one State can never be categorical imperative. In fact one State, one language should be the rule. And therefore people forming one language can divide themselves into many States.”

 

The Hindi speaking belt, of course, was too large to form a single state, right from the beginning. But it took a long while to truly see Ambdekar’s point in action:

“This prescient insight became a reality with the division of the two Telugu-speaking states in 2014.”

In his book, Ambedkar had drawn up some proposed divisions. Of UP, MP and Maharashtra. Today, all of them except Maharashtra have indeed split.

 

The author concludes by saying:

“We need many more such states using the “one state, one language” principle.”

 

I always find it impressive how much thought was given by so many folks at independence on the topic of creating frameworks – the constitution, the basis of states. How did they get that kind of knowledge? After all, many of the problems and criteria were uniquely Indian, and one could not copy/paste what had been done in Britain…

 

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