In the wake of the Telangana crisis and the nationwide clamour for more small states, the Government of India seems to be contemplating another States Reorganisation Committee.
There many arguments in favour of this. But the most important one might be that, following our failure to decentralise public administration, this might now be the only way to make government more responsive to people's needs and concerns by taking it closer to them.
What contributes most to these demands for small states are a sense of strong regional affinity that is stronger than the linguistic identity, uneven economic conditions leading to wide and easily discernable disparities in development, and the perceived concentration of political power with an identifiable political elite like the Kammas in Andhra Pradesh and Marathas in Maharashtra.
Contributing in equal measure to these is the non-ideological political climate that has descended upon us after one foreign economic paradigm failed and its economic opposite was deemed as the only way to go. What are after all the differences on economic philosophy and management between the BJP, Congress, TDP, Samajwadi parties and even the CPM?
The late Dr Rasheeduddin Khan most eloquently made out a case for smaller states way back in April 1973 in the seminar, at that time edited by the late Romesh Thapar. He had India divided according to its 56 socio-cultural sub-regions and a map showing these was the centrepiece of the article. Whenever I think of better public administration that map always appears.
Since the subject of small states has begun to emerge as a major issue again, with the recent by-poll results in Telangana writing its message very clearly on the wall and with Ramadoss raising the banner in Tamil Nadu and a vociferous cry for a Bundelkhand out of UP, it is a matter of time before small states will become a major political issue nationwide.
The Congress Party's election manifesto in 2004 had a new StatesReorganisation Commission on its agenda. Then why did it put it on the backburner and let it now boil over?
The seminar map is a veritable blueprint for the structuring of India. Out of UP and Bihar eight distinct sub-regions are identified. These are Uttaranchal, Rohelkhand, Braj, Oudh, Bhojpur, Mithila, Magadh and Jharkhand. The first and last of these have now become Constitutional and administrative realities.
But each one of the other unhappily wedded regions is very clearly a distinct region with its own predominant dialect and history. For instance Maithili, spoken in the area around Darbhanga in northern Bihar, is very different from Bhojpuri, spoken in the adjacent Bhojpur area. Similarly Brajbhasha in western UP is quite different from Avadhi spoken in central UP.
India's largest state in terms of area, MP, is broken into five distinct regions, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra into four each, AP, West Bengal and Karnataka into three each, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Orissa into two each and so on.
Since 1971, India's population has doubled to cross one billion. Even at constant prices (1980-81) the GNP has grown by a factor of 20. In 1971 the total money supply (M3) was Rs.11,019 crore, whereas it has now grown to over Rs. 500,000 crore. Naturally the size and scope of government has also changed.
The 1980-81 budget of the Government of India was a mere Rs 19,579 crore. It is now about Rs. 1,000,000 crore. The annual budgets of state governments too have grown likewise. States like UP, Maharashtra and AP now have annual budgets of over Rs 50000 crore each.
The total population of India in 1947 was about 320 million. Today, we have about that number of people who are below the poverty line. In the meantime India has become a very youthful country with 70 per cent of its people below the age of 30 of whom about 350 million are below the age of 14.
Clearly the task of government is not only much more enormous, but also much more complex when the rising expectations, impact of new technologies and demographic changes are factored in.
Political demands of viable sub-regions for new administrative arrangements are not necessarily antithetical to the territorial integrity of the country. They would not lead to balkanisation but to the restructuring of national identity.
The "Report of the States Reorganization Commission, 1955" states: "Unlike the United States of America, the Indian Union is not an indestructible union composed of indestructible states. But on the contrary the Union alone is indestructible but the individual states are not."
It would be unfortunate if demands for the restructuring of India by creating more states are seen only as mere political contests, where the just causes of individual socio-cultural and agro-climatic regions are merely weapons in the hands of out-of-work politicians deprived of a share of the benefits of office.
The writer is a commentator on social and political afairs
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