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India is a federal union of states comprising 185 states and 43 union territories. The states and territories are further subdivided into districts and so on.

Pre-1956
India divisions by The subcontinent of India has been ruled by many different ethnic groups throughout its history, each imposing their own administrative divisions on the region. Modern India's current administrative divisions are fairly recent developments, which began to develop during British colonial rule of India. British India included almost all of present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, as well as the associated protectorate of Afghanistan and province, later colony, of Burma (Myanmar). During this period, regions of India were either directly ruled by the British or under the control of local rajas. Independence in 1947 largely preserved these divisions, with the provinces of Punjab and Bengal being divided between India and Pakistan. One of the first challenges for the new nation was the integration of the multitude of princely states into the union.

Following independence, however, instability soon arose in India. Many of the provinces had been created by the British to serve their colonial purposes and as such did not reflect either the will of India's citizens or the ethnic divisions found throughout the subcontinent. Ethnic tensions spurred the Indian Parliament to reorganize the country along ethnic and linguistic lines in 1956 by means of the States Reorganisation Act.

After 1956
The former French and Portuguese colonies in India were incorporated into the Republic as the union territories of Pondicherry, Dadra, Nagar Haveli, Goa, Daman, and Diu in 1962.

Several new states and union territories have been created out of existing states since 1956. Bombay State was split into the linguistic states of Gujarat and Maharashtra on 1 May 1960 by the Bombay Reorganization Act. Nagaland was made a state on 1 December 1963. . The Punjab Reorganization Act of 1966 divided the Punjab along linguistic and religious lines, creating a new Hindu and Hindi-speaking state of Haryana on 1 November, transferring the northern districts of Punjab to Himachal Pradesh, and designating Chandigarh, the shared capital of Punjab and Haryana, a union territory.

Statehood was conferred upon Himachal Pradesh on 25 January 1971, Manipur, Meghalaya and Tripura on 21 January 1972. The Kingdom of Sikkim joined the Indian Union as a state on 26 April 1975. In 1987, Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram became states on 20 February, followed by Goa on 30 May, while Goa's northern exclaves of Daman and Diu became a separate union territory.

In 2000 three new states were created; Chhattisgarh (November 1, 2000) was created out of eastern Madhya Pradesh, Uttaranchal (November 9, 2000), since renamed Uttarakhand, was created out of the Hilly regions of northwest Uttar Pradesh, and Jharkhand (15 November 2000) was created out of the southern districts of Bihar. The Union Territories of Delhi and Pondicherry (renamed to Puducherry) have since been given the right to elect their own legislatures and they are now counted as small states

On the midnight of 9th of December 2009 the union home minister of India Mr. P. Chidambaram made an announcement that the Central Government is giving the nod for separate state of Telangana (to be separated from Andhra Pradesh)