The Centre for Policy Research invites you to a talk on:
The Borders that Shape India’s Democracy: Tracing 150 Years of the Evolution of Districts in India
Speaker:
Dr. Shivakumar Jolad, Associate Professor, FLAME University
Discussant:
Dr. Shamindra Nath Roy, Visiting Fellow, CPR
Monday, 8th December 2025, 11 AM IST onwards.
This event will be held in a hybrid mode at the CPR Conference Room and online via Zoom. Please register to attend.
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About the Talk:
India’s districts have been continually redrawn for more than a century, yet the administrative and political significance of this quiet transformation remains poorly understood. This talk presents findings from the India State Story project, which reconstructs 153 years of district evolution (1872–2025) through maps, split-history tables, panel datasets, and cartographic visualisations. It traces major waves of district formation, consolidation, bifurcation, and renaming across colonial, integration, linguistic reorganisation, and post-reform periods. By examining cross-state contrasts — from Tamil Nadu and Bihar to Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Assam, and the Himalayan states — the talk highlights how India’s federal design, political incentives, identity claims, and administrative justifications have jointly shaped this long arc of internal boundary-making.
Beyond documenting change, the project offers a scaffold for a broader research agenda on subnational governance and spatial political economy. It prompts deeper questions: Why do districts proliferate so rapidly, and what features of Indian federalism enable this? Why do states follow such divergent trajectories, and what structural or political factors explain these contrasts? What symbolic, cultural, linguistic, and commemorative purposes underlie renaming, and what cultural, administrative and financial costs do such changes impose? Do new districts truly bring administration closer to citizens, strengthen state capacity, and improve service delivery, or do they primarily extend bureaucratic presence through deconcentration rather than meaningful decentralisation? And finally, how can researchers construct harmonised long-term socio-economic datasets — across Census, NSS, NFHS, UDISE and other sources — despite continuous splits, mergers, and shifting district identities? The talk argues that answering these questions requires deeper engagement from the research community and clearer norms and accountability from governments, especially as India’s administrative map continues to evolve.
This study is part of The India State Story Project which traces 150 years of India’s internal and external boundaries— mapping how politics, colonial and postcolonial administration, and socio-political movements continually reshaped the subcontinent. From the first all-India Census of 1872 through the reorganisation of states and into the present, this visual and archival project reconstructs the evolution of India’s internal territories — its states and districts — showing how boundaries were drawn, divided, and reimagined over time.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Shivakumar Jolad works as an Associate Professor of Public Policy at FLAME University, Pune, India, specialising in demography and social policies focused on education, migration and human development. He is the founding director of India State Stories, a visual immersive archive of India’s territorial evolution. He studies the structure of the schooling system, education policy, and governance in India. He also works in quantitative history, focusing on India’s Constitutional debates, state formation and administrative evolution. His research spans the structure of India’s schooling system, education decentralisation, language diversity and medium of instruction, and the impacts of COVID-19 on unorganised sector workers, food security, and historical migration. Jolad has a PhD in Physics and a doctoral minor in Demography from Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA. Before joining FLAME University, he taught at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, India.
