Districts, Divisions and Firsts of Madhya Pradesh Notes

Madhya Pradesh lies in the middle of the country and has no coast and no international border, so its general knowledge paper leans heavily on administration: the divisions, the districts and the people who held office first. MPPSC, MPESB, the state police and teaching examinations ask these questions every year, and SSC and Railway papers with a state section ask the easiest of them. The state was formed on 1 November 1956 with Bhopal as its capital, it was the largest state of India by area until Chhattisgarh was carved out of it in 2000, and it is now the second largest with an area of 3,08,252 square kilometres and the fifth most populous, with 7.26 crore people recorded in the Census of 2011.

The ten divisions and their headquarters

Two names in this table are the ones papers test. The Chambal division is the only one whose headquarters does not carry its name: it is administered from Morena. The Narmadapuram division was called Hoshangabad until the district and the division were renamed Narmadapuram in 2021, after the Narmada, and a question may use either name.

How the districts took shape

The present state came into being under the States Reorganisation Act, 1956, which joined four units of 1950: the Part A state of Madhya Pradesh, whose capital was Nagpur, Madhya Bharat, Vindhya Pradesh with its capital at Rewa, and Bhopal. Marathi-speaking Vidarbha and Berar, with Nagpur, went to Bombay State. On 1 November 2000 the Madhya Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2000 created Chhattisgarh as the twenty-sixth state of India with sixteen districts taken from Madhya Pradesh, leaving the parent state forty-five districts. The number has risen since then, because a district in India is created by the state government by notification and not by Parliament: Niwari was notified in 2018 out of Tikamgarh, and three more districts were notified in 2023, so the total is now above fifty. A candidate should answer a question on the exact number from the latest state notification, but should be sure of the stable figures: ten divisions, forty-five districts in 2000, and the dates of the two reorganisations.

District extremes in the 2011 Census

• Most populous district: Indore; least populous district: Harda.
• Highest density of population: Bhopal; lowest density: Dindori.
• Highest literacy: Jabalpur; lowest literacy: Alirajpur, which was also among the lowest in the country.
• Highest sex ratio: Balaghat, the one district of the state above a thousand females per thousand males; lowest: Bhind.
• State averages for comparison: literacy about 69.3 per cent, sex ratio 931 and density 236 persons per square kilometre.

The firsts of Madhya Pradesh

The High Court itself has a double date worth keeping: the building at Jabalpur housed the High Court of Nagpur from 2 January 1936, and the High Court of Madhya Pradesh was constituted on 1 November 1956, with benches later at Indore and Gwalior. Kanha was also one of the first nine reserves taken up when Project Tiger began in the early nineteen seventies.

Points for revision

Learn the ten divisions as a list first, then attach Morena to Chambal and remember that Narmadapuram was Hoshangabad. Keep the two reorganisation dates with their numbers: 1956 for the formation of the state and 2000 for Chhattisgarh with sixteen districts. Take the Census extremes as four pairs, Indore against Harda, Bhopal against Dindori, Jabalpur against Alirajpur and Balaghat against Bhind. Learn the firsts as names, because the question is usually set from the office to the name, and keep Hidayatullah in mind twice over, as the first Chief Justice of this High Court and later as Chief Justice of India.