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Business News/ Opinion / Online-views/  Jairam Ramesh | Uttar Pradesh is ungovernable
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Jairam Ramesh | Uttar Pradesh is ungovernable

India's economic transformation will be incomplete without the full participation and contribution of Uttar Pradesh and this, in turn, is not possible without its radical reorganization

The mandate that the young Akhilesh Yadav himself received in 2012 was very clear and convincing. But even with the best of intentions, expectations have not been fulfilled in large part because of the present sprawling structure of the state itself. Photo: HTPremium
The mandate that the young Akhilesh Yadav himself received in 2012 was very clear and convincing. But even with the best of intentions, expectations have not been fulfilled in large part because of the present sprawling structure of the state itself. Photo: HT

Uttar Pradesh is very much in the news and, as it so often happens, for the wrong reasons. With every passing day, evidence mounts that the reorganization of India’s most populous state cannot continue to be ignored any longer. At present, Uttar Pradesh’s population of around 200 million would be the fifth-largest in the world, on par with Brazil.

The state’s population is conservatively expected to zoom to close to 420 million by the middle of this century. Today, Uttar Pradesh accounts for something like 16.5% of the country’s population and by 2050, this proportion could well be close to 25%. To put it bluntly, even with the most modern technology and with the strongest of political acumen and will, it is simply ungovernable. It is too big, too unwieldy to be run effectively. Internal devolution of powers to the 75 districts, 820-odd blocks and the 52,000-odd gram panchayats will make no difference whatsoever.

The structure of Uttar Pradesh has long been a subject of concern and debate. Speaking in the Lok Sabha on 7 July 1952, Jawaharlal Nehru himself had this to say: “I, for my part, would be perfectly agreeable if there were a proposition that Uttar Pradesh, for instance, be split up into four provinces. However, I doubt very much if my colleagues from Uttar Pradesh would relish the idea; on the contrary, they would probably like to have an additional chunk from some other province".

But the true democrat he was, Nehru did not have his way. And in his well-known book Thoughts on Linguistic States that came out in 1955, B.R. Ambedkar, whose position on linguistic states, like that of Nehru’s, evolved with the years, called for the trifurcation of Uttar Pradesh on three specific grounds—enhancing administrative efficiency, reducing the disproportionate influence of such a large state on the polity and better protecting minorities from the power of a numerically preponderant majority community.

The States Reorganisation Commission of 1955 did not recommend the division of Uttar Pradesh. But one of its members, the distinguished historian-diplomat K.M. Panikkar, penned a learned dissent note to the final report. He expressed great worries at the imbalance created by the disproportionate size of Uttar Pradesh and pointed to what he considered to be, in his own words, “the major and basic weakness of the Indian Constitution—the extraordinary disparity between one unit and the rest". His proposal was for the creation of a new state called Agra in addition to another state of Uttar Pradesh. Bemoaning what he called “this unnatural feature of our Constitution, Panikkar wrote “that the unmanageable size of UP stands in the way of efficient administration".

In 2000, after a prolonged period of agitation, Uttarakhand was carved out of Uttar Pradesh. It was done, in large part, to fulfil the aspirations of the hill regions of the state and also in recognition of the distinctive character of and special circumstances prevailing in that region. The division has had no impact on governance in UP, although it has opened up new opportunities for Uttarakhand.

Of course, decisive leadership can make a difference. For a long time, for example, Bihar was deemed ungovernable till Nitish Kumar demonstrated otherwise and his golden spell lasted a good eight years. But Uttar Pradesh is different—for one, its population is almost double that of Bihar and its area almost three times larger.

According the Indian Constitution (Article 3), consent of the state legislature is not a pre-requisite for its reorganization. Parliament is fully competent to restructure state boundaries but it can do so only after the President has referred the Bill to the legislature of the state being reorganised for expressing its views. This is how Andhra Pradesh was bifurcated. In the case of Uttar Pradesh, the state legislature had submitted a proposal to the Centre for reorganization in November 2011 when Mayawati was chief minister.

Mayawati’s proposal was for dividing Uttar Pradesh into four new states—Purvanchal (Eastern UP), Paschim Pradesh (Western UP), Bundelkhand (Southern UP) and Awadh Pradesh (Central UP). Political motives may well have influenced the timing of this proposal, but the fact remains that there is much to recommend it.

If Andhra Pradesh could be reorganised by Parliament in its wisdom, surely Uttar Pradesh—which has a more compelling case for such an intervention—could also be. With its stunning performance in the recent Lok Sabha polls in Uttar Pradesh, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which ironically has been a champion of smaller states, may be tempted to oppose such a proposal, thinking that it could get a decisive majority in the next vidhan sabha polls. But even if this were to happen, chances of good governance in Uttar Pradesh are impossible because of its inherent size.

It is not just a question of decisive electoral mandates. Such mandates have been forthcoming in the past.

Indeed, the mandate that the young Akhilesh Yadav himself received in 2012 was very clear and convincing. But even with the best of intentions, expectations have not been fulfilled in large part because of the present sprawling structure of the state itself.

Reorganization alone is not always a panacea: Chhattisgarh has moved ahead after being carved out of Madhya Pradesh in the year 2000 but Jharkhand formed out of Bihar in the same year has not. But in the unique case of Uttar Pradesh, not doing anything is no longer an option since the experience of the state over the last three decades particularly has demonstrated that good governance has reached a complete dead end—irrespective of personalities and parties. India’s economic transformation will be incomplete without the full participation and contribution of Uttar Pradesh. This, in turn, is not possible without its radical reorganization.

The author is a Rajya Sabha MP and former Union minister.

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Published: 03 Aug 2014, 11:43 PM IST
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