The creation of Telangana, nearly 60 years after locals first voiced fears of being co-opted into Andhra Pradesh, is a further step in the rationalization and restructuring of the Union of States India is meant to be. India was never meant to be a union of linguistic states, but a union of well-governed and managed states. This creation in 2014 was fully justified when Telangana, once among the poorest agro-climatic zones in the country, showed the fastest growth in the SGDP and established itself among the states with high per capita income.
Thus, the demand for new administrative units will be continuous, a demand aimed at bringing distant provincial governments closer to the distant capitals of the population. The BJP has from time to time said that it is in favor of a Vidharba state. BSP Supremo Mayawati has repeatedly expressed the view that Uttar Pradesh should be divided into three or four states. Even in Tamil Nadu, Dr. S. Ramadoss of the Pattal Makkali Katchi (PMK), a regional political party, had advocated the bifurcation of Tamil Nadu, with the northern districts being carved out to form a separate state.
Historically too there is some basis for this as the Tamil speaking region in the past included kingdoms centered around Kanchipuram and Tanjore-Madurai. The late J. Jayalalithaa strongly denounced this demand as “secession” when the PMK only wanted a smaller state within the Indian Union. The Chennai-centered state of Tamil Nadu that we now know was created by the British. Similarly, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat and several other linguistic states have no historical basis. The aspiration to linguistic sub-nationalism is a post-independence phenomenon.
India’s largest states – Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh – are also its worst off states and hence the acronym ‘Bimaru’ is most appropriate. They are also predominantly Hindi states, and so it is clear that there is no linguistic or historical basis for their creation and existence as they are. Yet, within their overall linguistic conformity, these states span a wide diversity of distinct regions, with commonly spoken languages, cultures, and historical traditions. Each of these states, whether in terms of land mass or population, would still be much larger than many countries in the world. Uttar Pradesh is larger in terms of population than Brazil, Japan or Bangladesh.
The late Dr. Rasheeduddin Khan had very eloquently made this case; of Hyderabad, I would add, in April 1973, in Seminar, which was then edited by the late Romesh Thapar. He had divided India into its 56 socio-cultural sub-regions and a map showing these was the centerpiece of the article. This image sticks in my mind, and whenever I think of better public administration, this card always pops up.
The Seminar card is a real project for the restructuring of India. Outside of UP and Bihar, eight distinct sub-regions are identified. These are Uttaranchal, Rohilkhand, Braj, Oudh, Bhojpur, Mithila, Magadh and Jharkhand. The first and the last of them have now become constitutional and administrative realities. But each of the other unfortunately married regions is very clearly a separate region with its own predominant dialect and history. For example, the Maithili spoken in the region around Darbhanga in North Bihar is very different from the Bhojpuri spoken in the adjacent Bhojpur region. Likewise, Brajbhasha in western UP is quite different from the Avadhi spoken in central UP. India’s largest state by land area, Madhya Pradesh, is divided into five distinct regions; Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra in four each, Andhra, West Bengal and Karnataka in three each, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Odisha in two each, and so on.
Since 1971, India’s population has doubled to over 1.3 billion. Even at constant prices (1980-81), the GNP was multiplied by 10, to reach the equivalent of 2,620 billion dollars. In 1971, the total money supply was Rs 11,019 crores but it has now risen to over Rs 24 lakh crores. Naturally, the size and scope of government has also changed. The Indian government‘s 1980-81 budget was only Rs 19,579 crore. It is now around Rs 20 lakh crores. The annual budgets of state governments have also increased in the same way.
The total population of India in 1947 was around 320 million. Today we have roughly that number of people living below the poverty line. Meanwhile, India has become a very young country, with 70% of its population under the age of 30, of which around 350 million are under the age of 14. Clearly, the government’s task is not only much more enormous, but much more complex when the rising expectations, the impact of new technologies and demographic changes are taken into account. Our record so far is cause for great concern and is a strong condemnation of the failure of the governance system in India.
That “the nature of the regime determines the nature of the outcome” is a well-known adage in public administration and public policy studies. The nature of a regime is not only influenced by its constitution, its guiding philosophy and the resulting system of government, but also by the structure of the system. We know from experience, both in the corporate world and in public administration, that monolithic and centralized structures fail when the size and scope of the organization increases. In public administration, this is called decentralization. Decentralization implies not only a top-down flow of decision-making, but also a greater proximity of the supervisory authority to the decision-making level.
Thus, if more decisions are taken by the districts and sub-districts, the state government, which is the supervisory authority, must also have fewer units to supervise. I have always maintained that the real concentration of power is not with the Union government but with the state governments. From a good governance perspective, this is clearly unacceptable.
The “Report of the States Reorganization Commission, 1955” states: “Unlike the United States of America, the Indian Union is not an indestructible union of indestructible states. But on the contrary, the Union alone is indestructible, but individual states are not. It would be unfortunate if India’s demands for restructuring by creating more states were seen as mere political competitions, where the just causes of individual socio-cultural and agro-climatic regions are but a weapon in the hands of the outside. deprived labor politicians of a share of the benefits of office.
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