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States of India |
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The present division of India into states is by and large a result of the States Reorganization Act passed in 1956, and brought into effect in subsequent years. Before independence, the states were organized in such a way as to suit the political interest of the colonial rulers. This arrangement was in no way a proper reflection of ethnic diversity and multiplicity of languages that were, and still are, the most prominent features of Indian demographic setup. As a result, the Indian parliament came up with the aforesaid legislation to meet the demand posed by various linguistic and ethnic groups of the country, and to carry out the task of a more appropriate organization of Indian states.
Thus, the Bombay state was divided on linguistic lines to yield two separate states for the Marathi speaking people and the Gujarati speaking people, later to be known as Maharashtra and Gujarat respectively.
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Madhya Bharat, Bhopal and Vindhya Pradesh were merged to create the state of Madhya Pradesh. Similarly, the Malabar districts of the Madras State was merged with the Travancore-Cochin state to bring into existence of the state of Kerala. A lot of other changes occurred in the boundaries of the existing states and several of them underwent a change in their names also.
The creation of new states out of the existing ones has remained a regular feature since the independence. We have seen the division of Punjab into three separate states, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana being the other two. We have also seen the elevation of some states from their erstwhile status as union territories of India. Goa, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura, Manipur and Sikkim were incorporated into the Indian Republic as union territories, and were provided with the status of individual states in later years. In recent years, we saw the creation of three new states from the erstwhile states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh. These three new states, namely Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh have brought the total number of Indian states to twenty eight. Apart from these states, there are seven union territories also.
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