Districts and Divisions of Rajasthan: Exam Notes

Rajasthan is the largest state of India by area, and the way that area is divided for administration is a standing favourite with RPSC, RSMSSB, Rajasthan Police, SSC and Railway paper setters. The state is governed through a ladder that runs from the division at the top to the village at the bottom, and it is the rungs of that ladder that the questions test: how many divisions there are, how many districts, which district sits in which division, and which district was carved out of which and when. This note sets out the ladder, the division-wise list of districts as the Board of Revenue records it, the order in which the district map grew, the border districts, and the district records of the 2011 Census that examiners repeat year after year.

The administrative ladder of the state

Below the secretariat at Jaipur, Rajasthan is arranged in divisions, each headed by a Divisional Commissioner. A division is a group of districts and works as a revenue and supervisory unit; it elects nobody and makes no law. Each district is headed by the District Collector, who is also the District Magistrate, and who is at once the chief revenue officer and the chief executive officer of the district. Law and order in a district rests with a Superintendent of Police, and in the larger cities with a Police Commissioner. Below the district come the sub-division under a Sub-Divisional Officer, the tehsil under a Tehsildar, and the sub-tehsil under a Naib Tehsildar. Running beside this revenue ladder is the rural self-government ladder of Zila Parishad, Panchayat Samiti and Gram Panchayat, and the urban one of municipal corporations, councils and boards.

The office of Divisional Commissioner has a broken history that examiners enjoy. It was abolished in 1962 as a needless layer and restored in 1987, when the state was arranged in six divisions: Jaipur, Jodhpur, Ajmer, Kota, Bikaner and Udaipur. Bharatpur was made the seventh division on 4 June 2005. Three more divisions, Banswara, Pali and Sikar, were created in the reorganisation of 2023 and were withdrawn in December 2024, which brings the count back to seven.

The seven divisions and the districts in each

The Board of Revenue at Ajmer, which keeps the revenue records of the state, lists forty-one districts grouped in seven divisions, and the state portal gives the same district figure. Jodhpur is the largest division by number of districts with eight; Bikaner and Kota are the smallest with four each.

How the district map grew

Rajasthan was assembled from the princely states of Rajputana in stages between 1948 and 1956. When the States Reorganisation Act took effect on 1 November 1956 and Ajmer state was merged in, the new state had twenty-six districts. Seven more were added over the next half century, one at a time or in small groups, and each of those creations is a dated fact worth memorising.

The reorganisation of 2023 was the largest change the map has ever seen. Because Jaipur and Jodhpur were each split into a city district and a rural district, nineteen new names took the total from thirty-three to fifty rather than to fifty-two. In December 2024 the state cabinet reviewed the exercise and withdrew nine of the new districts, namely Anupgarh, Dudu, Gangapur City, Jaipur Rural, Jodhpur Rural, Kekri, Neem Ka Thana, Sanchore and Shahpura, along with all three new divisions. The eight new districts that survive are Balotra, Beawar, Deeg, Didwana-Kuchaman, Khairthal-Tijara, Kotputli-Behror, Phalodi and Salumbar, and those are the names most often missed in the exam hall.

Border districts and the four extremities

Rajasthan touches five Indian states and one foreign country. Punjab lies to the north-west, Haryana to the north-east, Uttar Pradesh to the east, Madhya Pradesh to the south-east and Gujarat to the south-west; Madhya Pradesh gives the longest state boundary and Punjab the shortest. The western edge is the international boundary with Pakistan, about 1,070 kilometres of the Radcliffe Line, and only four districts stand on it: Sri Ganganagar, Bikaner, Jaisalmer and Barmer. Jaisalmer has the longest stretch of that border. Punjab is met by only two districts, Sri Ganganagar and Hanumangarh. The four extremities of the state are asked as a set: the northernmost point lies in Sri Ganganagar district, the southernmost in Banswara, the easternmost in Dhaulpur and the westernmost in Jaisalmer. The Tropic of Cancer crosses only the southern tip of the state, through Banswara and Dungarpur districts.

District records of the 2011 Census

These figures are fixed to the Census of 2011 and to the thirty-three districts as they then stood, which is exactly why they are safe to ask and safe to learn.