11/8/22, 6:06 PM Administrative Reforms Commission: Do India's newly added districts yield desired governance results?

results? - The Economic Times

Politics
English Edition | 08 November, 2022, 06:06 PM IST | Today's Paper

Do India's newly added districts yield desired

governance results?
Synopsis
India has added 87 new districts since 2011 as states are keen on smaller administrative units.

When Telangana was carved out as India’s youngest state in June 2014, the
Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), the political party closely associated with the
movement and which formed the first government, had reasons to rejoice. But
Telangana Chief Minister and TRS president K Chandrasekhar Rao was not happy
with just a new state. He wanted new districts, and that too, quite a few of them.
Telangana only had 10 districts and their average population, as per the 2011
Census, was 35 lakh, nearly twice the national average. The average size of these
districts was around 11,200 sq km, compared with 4,950 sq km in India.
Representative Image
Telangana’s districts were too big for their own good.

So Rao set about deciding which districts had to be divided and how. Two years later, he had created 21 new districts —
Warangal was split into five districts and Karimnagar into four. Rao was not done, though. Earlier this year, he added two
more districts, taking the total to 33, more than three times the original figure. Now the average population per district in
the state is 11.8 lakh, based on the government’s population projections, and the average district size is around 3,400 sq
km.

Rao’s counterpart in Andhra Pradesh, YS Jagan Mohan Reddy, wants to follow suit. Reddy plans to expand the state’s
districts from 13 to 25. Andhra’s districts have the country’s second highest average population — 41 lakh — after West
Bengal, where a district has nearly 43 lakh people on average. Andhra’s neighbour Tamil Nadu, the largest of the southern
states, has since January added three districts — Kallkurichi, Tenkasi and Chengalpattu — to the 32 it already had.

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11/8/22, 6:06 PM Administrative Reforms Commission: Do India's newly added districts yield desired governance results? - The Economic Times

It is clear that states want smaller districts as they believe they can be better governed. Since the 2011 Census, 87 new
districts have been created, compared with 47 between 2001 and 2011. India now has 727 districts, more than twice the
number in the 1971 Census. Come 2021, we are likely to have added over 100 districts in the past decade. But do smaller
districts necessarily result in better administration or is the change merely cosmetic?

Abhijit Bangar, Nagpur municipal commissioner, thinks it is the former. He was the first collector of Palghar district, near
Mumbai, in 2014, after it was split from Thane, then India’s most populous district. He was there for nearly three years.
He realised the problems of a large district when he was transferred to Amravati, a district 650 km east and more than
twice the size of Palghar. “I felt I wouldn’t be able to do justice to Amravati,” he recalls. The farthest taluka in Amravati is
around 150 km from the district headquarters, while in Palghar the distance is just half.

According to EAS Sarma, a former bureaucrat in the Union government, smaller districts bring administration closer to
the people but only if “parallel steps are taken to enhance transparency in the functioning of the public offices”.

Others think the size of a district is not a big factor in governance as it is often made out to be. “Size is not as important as
the mindset of officials. The district administration is accountable to the higher-ups, not to the people,” says G Bhaskara
Rao, a former Unicef consultant to Telangana’s planning department.

Since the bodies below the district administration like the zilla parishad and the panchayat samiti do not enjoy a lot of
powers, people take most of their grievances to the collector, for which they often have to travel for hours. Jayaprakash
Narayan, a former civil servant and ex-MLA from Andhra Pradesh, says creating smaller districts without empowering
these bodies is just a “substitute for genuine decentralisation”.

Districts are the third tier of India’s governance structure, after the Centre and the state. Some states also have divisions
based on regions between states and districts. For instance, Maharashtra is divided into six divisions, including Konkan,
Aurangabad and Pune, and Karnataka has four divisions, like Bengaluru and Belagavi. A district, which is headed by a

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11/8/22, 6:06 PM Administrative Reforms Commission: Do India's newly added districts yield desired governance results? - The Economic Times

collector or district magistrate or deputy commissioner, is made up of revenue sub-divisions and then talukas or tehsils
or mandals.

Though the average district has become 44% smaller in area since 1981, the average number of people in a district has
risen from 16.6 lakh to 18.6 lakh, thanks to population growth. Apart from the southern states, Arunachal Pradesh
increased the number of its districts from 22 to 25 last year. It now has the lowest average population per district in the
country — 61,950. Manipur added seven districts to its existing nine in 2016; and Gujarat created seven new districts out
of 27 in 2013.

There are other benefits to adding new districts than ease of governance, says T Harish Rao, a former minister in the
Telangana government. “Growth centres are created in new district headquarters and land rates go up.” He adds that new
districts also benefit from district-specific central government initiatives. For instance, the government sets up an
agricultural research and assistance centre and a residential school for gifted children in every district.

However, funding under certain schemes will be apportioned among old and new districts or be directed to either of
them, depending on whether one or both of them qualify. Among the Centre’s key district-centric programmes is one for
backward districts. The government has mandated that 60% of the corporate social responsibility funds of central
government-owned companies set aside for health, education and nutrition be spent on these 113 districts. Moreover,
additional funding of Rs 1,000 crore has been made available for two years for the best performing of these districts.

It Ain’t Easy Regardless of the benefits that accrue to a new district, the very process of creating one can be challenging,
says Bangar about his Palghar experience. “We had to find office space for 59 different departments and fill many
positions. The collector's office alone had 200 people. "He had to go through 30,000 applications to appoint 150 clerks.
"You are a new district for six months. After that the government expects performance on par with other districts," adds
Bangar.

Creating a new district is within the purview of the state government, which can do so through an executive order or by
passing a bill in the assembly, depending on the state. Moreover, reorganising existing districts to form new ones can also
have a political motive. There was speculation that Telangana's decision to triple its districts was partly the chief
minister's way of pleasing TRS workers by creating more party posts, but Harish Rao denies that. Narayan, who was part

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11/8/22, 6:06 PM Administrative Reforms Commission: Do India's newly added districts yield desired governance results? - The Economic Times

of the 2nd Administrative Reforms Commission in the 2000s, calls the political gains from new district a "minor
dividend". "In the short term, it's a popular move since everyone wants a district headquarters." He adds that the
collectors of new districts he spoke to in Telangana are glad that they can now devote a lot more time to their districts'
issues. "I didn't anticipate that."

There is no arguing that smaller districts are definitely better, but only up to a point, says Bangar. "If the district is too
small, then the administration will be underutilised."

With 10 states, including Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, having a higher average population per district
than the country, the trend of breaking up districts is likely to continue. And though the district officials may be able to
do a better job of governing a smaller unit, the formation of new districts would be better served by local bodies with
more powers.

( Originally published on Aug 03, 2019 )

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