The lure of ‘maximum government’

MINIMUM government, maximum governance — it’s an appealing and apt notion. The other popular notion is that the governance structure in India has only three powerful pillars: Prime Minister (PM), Chief Minister (CM) and the District Magistrate (DM), making PM-CM-DM the trinity that rules India.

The creation of a new district, essentially an administrative unit, doesn’t seem to follow any rational principle.

I couldn’t find the exact number of districts that existed in India at the time of Partition, but there were 402 at the time of the first post-Independence Census in 1951, and there were 27 states and three Union Territories (UTs). As per the latest count, there are 28 states and eight UTs and 806 districts. Five of them were added recently in Ladakh — the youngest UT, created in 2019 — taking the number of its districts from two to seven.

The Census-wise number of districts was: 1951 — 402; 1961 — 436; 1971 — 449; 1981 — 461; 1991 — 476; 2001 — 593; 2011 — 640.

Seventy-four districts were added till 1991. The next decade (1991-2001) saw the addition of 117 districts; this number dropped to 47 in the decade between 2001 and 2011. The last 13 years have seen the creation of 166 districts.

In 1951, Andhra Pradesh (AP) had 19 districts and Hyderabad state had 17; today, AP has 26, while Telangana, which was carved out of AP, has 33. Similarly, the number has gone up from 13 to 35 in Assam, 18 to 38 in Bihar, one to 11 in Delhi, six to 12 in Himachal Pradesh, six to 20 in Jammu & Kashmir, 12 to 23 in Punjab, 13 to 30 in Odisha, 21 to 50 in Rajasthan, 40 to 75 in Uttar Pradesh and from 15 to 30 in West Bengal.

The record of some of the new states created after the enactment of the States Reorganisation Act, 1956, is revealing. Haryana has 22 districts, up from the seven in 1966, when it was created. Telangana’s count has gone up from 10 to 33, Uttarakhand from nine to 13, Jharkhand from 18 to 24, and Chhattisgarh from 16 to 33.

The creation of a new district, essentially an administrative unit, doesn’t seem to follow any rational principle. There are no defined geographical or demographic criteria for the creation of a district. Kutch, the largest district in India, has an area of 45,674 sq km and a population of 2,092,371. Mahe, the smallest district, has an area of 8.69 sq km and a population of 41,816. North 24 Parganas, the biggest district by population, has 10,009,781 people and an area of 4,094 sq km, while Dibang Valley, the smallest, has a population of 8,004 and an area of 9,129 sq km. The population of undivided Leh district is 133,487, with an area of 45,110 sq km, and Kargil’s population is 140,802, with an area of 14,086 sq km. Now Drass and Zanskar have been created out of Kargil and Changthang, Nubra and Sham Valley out of Leh. Their geographical demarcation and population are not clear from the announcement of their birth.

It is true that the original Ladakh district was too huge to be administered. Kargil and Leh were culturally distinct, which made both regions unique. This led to the creation of Kargil as a separate district in 1979. The truncated Leh district continued to be the second largest district in the country geographically.

New districts in India generally are the outcome of a political demand rather than any objective criteria. For example, in the case of Ladakh, there were protests for the creation of a new Muslim-majority district of Sankoo out of Kargil, ostensibly as it remained cut off from Kargil during winters. Similar demands were made by the people of Zanskar for a new district out of Kargil. The same could be said of Drass, Changthang, Khaltsi and Turtuk, all parts of Leh.

However, is the mere demand for granting the status of a district enough justification for creating a new administrative unit that imposes a financial burden on the exchequer? A new district entails additional manpower and the construction of new office and residential buildings. A new district is generally an upgrade from subdivision headquarters with the expectation that an attendant setup like a superintendent of police and other district-level offices would be established. That is often not the case as the other commensurate offices take a long time coming up. Sometimes, the upgradation of all departmental offices is neither needed nor possible due to budgetary constraints.

The key point is that a new district doesn’t lead to any greater devolution of authority to the district head. Therefore, it is hard to understand how an official who couldn’t effectively administer a larger area can be administratively more effective in a smaller area exercising the same powers. This was perhaps justified in times when physical distance contributed to delays, but in an era of technology-driven governance with a vast functional communication network, it might be more useful to delegate authority, as was done in the far-flung snowbound districts when they became inaccessible, and to develop decision-making systems that do not depend on the physical presence of higher authorities at the local level.

I am not aware if it is possible to lay down objective parameters for the creation of new administrative units. I am not sure if we could even evolve the concept of a viable district. There is a need to carry out a cost-benefit analysis of the districts created in the past few decades. A new district would have certainly led to more construction and urbanisation, but has it improved the quality of governance and the environment? For example, it is a moot point whether Ladakh, which was earlier administered by a DC and had an empowered autonomous elected council, is better governed with the creation of the office of the lieutenant governor, a chief secretary, half a dozen secretaries, a similar high-ranking hierarchy in other departments, and whether all this would improve the quality of development taking place in the ecologically fragile region.

When my daughter was the DM of Leh a few years ago, she would often joke that the district she headed was bigger than the entire state of Haryana where I served. A five-hour drive in any direction from Leh city would still keep you in the same district, whereas a mere three-hour drive from the centre of Haryana would take you outside the state boundaries.

The craze for creating new administrative units reminds me of the time when we were under trainees in Haryana in 1981. One of us was in Hisar district that had Adampur village, which had been upgraded to a block headquarters because the then chief minister belonged to that place. The divisional commissioner of Hisar would jokingly tell my batchmate that he would retire as the divisional commissioner of Adampur division. Although that prophecy didn’t come true, who knows how far the lure of ‘maximum government’ would go.