Districts, Divisions and Firsts of Haryana: Facts and MCQs

Haryana is administered as six revenue divisions, twenty-two districts, a ladder of sub-divisions and tehsils below them, and 140 community development blocks for village work. The chapter reads like a list until a candidate sees how often it is set: HSSC, HPSC, Haryana Police, clerk and patwari papers ask which division a district belongs to, which district was created in which year, which district is the largest or the smallest, where a district's headquarters sits when it is not in the town of the same name, and the long roll of the state's firsts. Every answer here is a name, a number or a year, so the tables below are worth memorising rather than reading.

The administrative ladder of the state

Haryana's revenue administration runs in four steps. A division is the largest unit and is headed by a Divisional Commissioner of the Indian Administrative Service, who supervises the Deputy Commissioners of the districts placed under that division. A district comes next, under a Deputy Commissioner who is also the District Magistrate and the Collector. Each district is divided into sub-divisions headed by a Sub-Divisional Officer (Civil), commonly called the SDM, and each sub-division into tehsils under a Tehsildar, with sub-tehsils under a Naib Tehsildar below that. For development and panchayat work the district is divided instead into community development blocks, each under a Block Development and Panchayat Officer. The state portal of Haryana puts the present count at 22 districts, 140 blocks and 7,356 villages over an area of 44,212 square kilometres. Police administration is a separate ladder of ranges, commissionerates and police districts and does not follow the revenue divisions, which is a distinction examiners like to test.

The six divisions and their districts

Haryana began with four divisions, Ambala, Rohtak, Gurgaon and Hisar. Karnal and Faridabad were carved out of them later, and the offices of the Divisional Commissioners now describe the state as having six divisions. Learn the divisions as blocks of districts, because the question is almost always about one district's division.

From seven districts to twenty-two

The state started on 1 November 1966 with seven districts and reached twenty-two in fifty years. The table gives the order in which they came, which is the form in which the question is usually asked.

The district administration of Charkhi Dadri records that the state notified it as the twenty-second district of Haryana on 1 December 2016; it was carved out of Bhiwani and is the newest district. Palwal, separated from Faridabad in 2008, was the twenty-first, and Mewat, cut out of Gurgaon in 2005, the twentieth. Three parent-and-child pairs worth remembering alongside these are Panchkula out of Ambala, Fatehabad out of Hisar and Jhajjar out of Rohtak.

The districts examiners ask about by name

• Sirsa, in the south-west on the Punjab and Rajasthan borders, is the largest district of Haryana in area; Bhiwani held that place until Charkhi Dadri was taken out of it in 2016.
• Faridabad is the smallest district of the state in area, and in the Census of 2011 it was both the most populous and the most densely peopled district.
• Panchkula was the least populous of the districts existing at the Census of 2011, and Sirsa the least densely peopled.
• Mahendragarh district has its headquarters at Narnaul, not at Mahendragarh town; this is the one mismatch of district name and headquarters in the state and the standard trap of the chapter.
• Nuh, recorded as Mewat in 2011, had the highest sex ratio of any district of the state at 907 and the lowest literacy rate, while Gurgaon had the highest literacy.
• Yamunanagar is the only district of Haryana that touches Uttarakhand; Panchkula, Ambala and Yamunanagar are the districts that touch Himachal Pradesh.
• Four districts touch Delhi, namely Sonipat, Jhajjar, Gurugram and Faridabad, and a large part of the state falls inside the National Capital Region.
• Chandigarh, the capital, is a Union Territory shared with Punjab and is not a district of Haryana; Panchkula district adjoins it.

The firsts of Haryana

• First Chief Minister: Pandit Bhagwat Dayal Sharma, who took office on 1 November 1966, the day the state was formed.
• First Governor: Dharma Vira.
• First Speaker of the Vidhan Sabha: Rao Birender Singh, who became the first non-Congress Chief Minister of the state in 1967.
• First state in India to carry electricity to every one of its villages, in 1970.
• Oldest university of the state: Kurukshetra University, founded in 1956, ten years before Haryana itself.
• First agricultural university: Chaudhary Charan Singh Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar, 1970.
• Seventeenth state of the Indian Union, formed under the Punjab Reorganisation Act, 1966, and 1 November is kept as Haryana Day.
• Newest district: Charkhi Dadri, notified on 1 December 2016; newest divisions: Karnal and Faridabad.

Names that changed

In 2016 the state renamed Gurgaon as Gurugram and Mewat as Nuh, so an older book or answer key may still carry the former names and a question may use either. Mewat district, created in 2005 with its headquarters at Nuh, took the name of its headquarters town. Charkhi Dadri is the only district of Haryana whose name joins two settlements, Charkhi and Dadri. Gurugram and Faridabad are division headquarters as well as district headquarters, while Nuh and Palwal, both of the Faridabad division, were once parts of Gurgaon and Faridabad districts respectively. Keeping the old and the new names together, with the parent district of each new one, covers most of the matching questions set from this chapter.