Uttar Pradesh Districts, Divisions and Firsts: Notes

Uttar Pradesh is divided into 75 districts, grouped into 18 divisions, with Lucknow as the capital. A division is headed by a Commissioner and a district by a District Magistrate, below whom come the tehsil under a Sub-Divisional Magistrate and the development block under a Block Development Officer. The present map is recent. The United Provinces were renamed Uttar Pradesh on 24 January 1950, which is why that date is kept as Uttar Pradesh Day; thirteen hill districts were taken out on 9 November 2000 to form Uttaranchal, now Uttarakhand, leaving the state with seventy districts; and five more were carved out between 2008 and 2011, giving the present seventy-five. State papers ask the number of districts and divisions, the headquarters of the divisions that do not carry their city's name, the border districts and the list of firsts.

The eighteen divisions

Most divisions are named after their headquarters, but two are not, and those two are asked again and again: the Chitrakoot Dham division has its headquarters at Banda, and the Devipatan division at Gonda.

Borders and the districts on them

Uttar Pradesh touches nine states and union territories, more than almost any other state: Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Bihar, besides an international boundary with Nepal. Two border facts are set almost every year. Sonbhadra, in the extreme south-east, touches four states, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Bihar, and is the only district in India to border four states; it is also the second largest district of the state in area and is called the energy capital of Uttar Pradesh for its power stations. Saharanpur, in the extreme north-west, touches Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana. Seven districts lie along the Nepal border: Pilibhit, Lakhimpur Kheri, Bahraich, Shravasti, Balrampur, Siddharthnagar and Maharajganj.

The districts at the top and bottom of the lists

The newest districts are Kasganj, created in 2008, Amethi in 2010, and Hapur, Sambhal and Shamli in 2011. All five were first given other names, Kanshiram Nagar, Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj Nagar, Panchsheel Nagar, Bhim Nagar and Prabuddh Nagar, and were renamed in 2012 after the towns at their headquarters. In 2018 two older names changed: Allahabad became Prayagraj and Faizabad became Ayodhya, both as district and as division, and the Mughalsarai railway junction in Chandauli was renamed after Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya.

The firsts of Uttar Pradesh

The state's firsts are a favourite one-line question. Sarojini Naidu became the first Governor of Uttar Pradesh in 1947 and was thereby the first woman Governor in India. Govind Ballabh Pant, who had been Premier of the United Provinces, was the first Chief Minister. Sucheta Kripalani became Chief Minister in 1963 and was the first woman to head any state government in India. Purushottam Das Tandon was the first Speaker of the Legislative Assembly. In education, the University of Allahabad, founded in 1887, is the oldest university of the state and one of the oldest in the country; Banaras Hindu University was founded by Madan Mohan Malaviya in 1916 and Aligarh Muslim University took its present form in 1920. The Allahabad High Court, which goes back to 1866, is the oldest and the largest High Court in the country and has a bench at Lucknow. Narora in Bulandshahr district holds the state's only atomic power station, and Lucknow was the first city of the state to run a metro rail, in 2017. The state sends 80 members to the Lok Sabha, more than any other state, and has given the country more Prime Ministers than any other.

Symbols and some useful markers

The state animal of Uttar Pradesh is the swamp deer, called barasingha; the state bird is the sarus crane, the tallest flying bird in the world; the state tree is the ashok and the state flower the palash. Uttar Pradesh Day is observed on 24 January. For revision, keep three sets separately: the eighteen divisions with their headquarters, the border districts, and the Census 2011 superlatives, because questions move between them within the same paper.