Telangana was born on 2nd June as India’s 29th state, carving a new political territory out of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh with the same number of inhabitants as Iraq or Canada.
Andhra Pradesh Governor E S L Narasimhan was on 2nd June sworn in as the Governor of Telangana, the country’s 29th state.
Andhra Pradesh High Court Chief Justice Kalyan Jyoti Sengupta administered the oath to Mr. Narasimhan, who will be the common Governor to Telangana and residuary Andhra Pradesh.
Hyderabad will be the joint capital of Telangana and residuary Andhra Pradesh
Kalvakuntla Chandrashekhar Rao, known as KCR, was sworn in as the state’s first chief minister in the capital Hyderabad.
Telangana is not the first new state created since India’s independence from Britain in 1947 – Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh were formed as recently as 2000 – and is unlikely to be the last.
Ethnic, linguistic and regional groups have pressed for their own states in various parts of the country, and economists argue that some of the larger states are in any case too unwieldy to manage as a single unit.
Uttar Pradesh, with more than 200m people, is the most populous in India and has more inhabitants than Brazil. If Telangana were a country, it would be the world’s 38th largest nation.
Telugu-speakers from northern Andhra Pradesh have been agitating for their own state since the 1960s, and Mr Rao formed his Telangana Rashtra Samithi party in 2001. Telangana activists complained that their region was neglected by the wealthier inhabitants of the coastal and southern parts of Andhra.
The new state, however, is landlocked, arid and subject to the depredations of rural Maoist rebels known as Naxalites, and is likely to depend for years on the revenues generated by the thriving city of Hyderabad.
When it was in power in New Delhi ahead of this year’s Indian general election, the Congress party championed the formation of Telangana in the hope of winning seats there in the national parliament.
But the tactic backfired. Congress was accused of dithering and delay by Telangana supporters and it took only two of the 17 Telangana seats – and won none among the disenchanted voters in the rest of Andhra Pradesh.
