Inter-State Border Disputes of India: Articles, Cases

India's internal boundaries were not drawn once and left alone. They were redrawn by language, by hill and plain, and by administrative convenience, and each redrawing left villages, revenue circles and forest blocks whose ownership two states still read differently. A border dispute between states is therefore a dispute about old notifications, survey maps and revenue records rather than about territory in the international sense, and the Constitution gives Parliament and the Supreme Court the tools to settle it.

The constitutional framework

Article 3 lets Parliament form a new state, increase or reduce the area of a state, alter its boundaries and change its name, by a simple majority. Two conditions attach: the Bill may be introduced only on the recommendation of the President, and the President must first refer it to the legislature of the state affected for its views, which are not binding. That is why no state can refuse a boundary change made by Parliament, and why such a change is not treated as an amendment of the Constitution. Article 131 gives the Supreme Court original jurisdiction, which means a case that begins there, in disputes between the Government of India and a state and between two or more states, and most land boundary suits reach it this way. Article 262 deals separately with disputes about the waters of inter-state rivers and allows Parliament to bar the courts, which it did through the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act of 1956, so a water dispute goes to a tribunal and a land dispute to the Supreme Court. Article 263 allows the President to set up an Inter-State Council to inquire into and advise on disputes between states; such a Council was constituted in 1990. Five Zonal Councils were created by the States Reorganisation Act of 1956 as standing forums for neighbouring states, with the North Eastern Council added later by its own Act of 1971.

How the boundaries came to be

Andhra State, carved out of Madras in 1953 after the death of Potti Sriramulu, was the first state formed on a linguistic basis. The States Reorganisation Commission under Fazl Ali, with K. M. Panikkar and Hriday Nath Kunzru, reported in 1955, and the States Reorganisation Act of 1956 reorganised the country into states and union territories on broadly linguistic lines. Bombay State was divided into Maharashtra and Gujarat in 1960. The Punjab Reorganisation Act of 1966 created Haryana, gave the hill areas to Himachal Pradesh and made Chandigarh a union territory serving as the joint capital of Punjab and Haryana. In the north east, Nagaland became a state in 1963, Meghalaya in 1972 and Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh in 1987, each separation leaving a boundary to be marked on the ground.

The disputes examiners ask about

The Maharashtra and Karnataka dispute is the oldest and most examined. After the reorganisation of 1956 placed Belagavi, with its large Marathi-speaking population, in Mysore State, Maharashtra pressed its claim, and the Centre appointed the Mahajan Commission under former Chief Justice Mehr Chand Mahajan in 1966. Its report, submitted in 1967, broadly went against Maharashtra's main claim and was rejected by Maharashtra while Karnataka accepted it, so the matter remains before the Supreme Court. Karnataka built a second legislature building, the Suvarna Vidhana Soudha, at Belagavi and holds a winter session there. In the north east, the Assam and Nagaland dispute turns on a belt along the foothills, examined over the years by commissions including those headed by Justice Sundaram and Justice Shastri; the Assam and Arunachal Pradesh boundary runs for well over a thousand kilometres along the plains and foothills, and the two states signed the Namsai Declaration in 2022 to reduce the number of villages in dispute.

How such disputes are settled

Four routes are used, and exams expect them in order. First, bilateral talks between chief ministers, usually with regional committees of officials and legislators doing the survey work; the Assam agreements of recent years followed this route. Second, a commission or committee appointed by the Centre, as with the Mahajan Commission, whose report has weight but binds nobody by itself. Third, a suit in the Supreme Court under Article 131, where the court relies on the notifications, settlement records and survey maps of the time. Fourth, an Act of Parliament under Article 3, which can simply transfer the territory and end the argument, as earlier boundary changes between states have done. Alongside these sit the standing bodies: the Inter-State Council under Article 263, the Zonal Councils, the North Eastern Council and the Ministry of Home Affairs, with the Survey of India providing the maps on which any settlement is finally written.