Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: How many states is India divided into?
India is a country located in southern Asia. With over 1.3 billion people, India is the most populous democracy in the world. It is a federal constitutional republic governed under a parliamentary system consisting of 29
states and 7 union territories. All states, as well as the union territories of Puducherry and the National Capital Territory of Delhi, have elected legislatures and governments, both patterned on the Westminster model. The remaining five union territories are directly ruled by the centre through appointed administrators. In 1956, under the States Reorganisation Act, states were reorganised on a linguistic basis. Since then, their structure has remained largely unchanged. Each state or union territory is further divided into administrative districts..
Religion in India is characterised by a diversity of religious beliefs and practices. India is a secular state with no state religion. The Indian subcontinent is the birthplace of four of the world's major religions; namely Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. Throughout India's history, religion has been an important part of the country's culture. Religious diversity and religious tolerance are both established in the country by the law and custom; the Constitution of India has declared the right to freedom of religion to be a fundamental right.
India is home to two major language families: Indo-Aryan (spoken by about 74% of the population) and Dravidian (spoken by 24% of the population). Other languages spoken in India come from the Austroasiatic and Sino-Tibetan language families. India has no national language. Hindi, with the largest number of speakers, is the official language of the government. English is used extensively in business and administration and has the status of a "subsidiary official language"; it is important in education, especially as a medium of higher education. Each state and union territory has one or more official languages, and the constitution recognises in particular 22 "scheduled languages".
Each state is divided into districts. The district's senior civil servant is the District Collector/District Magistrate, who is an officer from the IAS cadre. These districts are further subdivided into Revenue Subdivisions or Prants (West India). Each Subdivision is under the charge of an officer designated as a Subdivisional Magistrate (S.D.M.) or "Deputy Collector" who is a member of the State Civil Services cadre. These subdivisions are divided into various "Tehsils" or "Talukas". These "Tehsils" or "Talukas" are administered by a "Tehsildar", also known as a Talukdar in some states of India. In the State of west Bengal subdivisions are divided into Community Devolopment Block or Blocks, A Block is Administrated by BDO or Block Development Officer , who is a member of state Civil Services cadre. and the post is similar to Tehsildar. The "Tehsils/Talukas" are further divided by groups of villages. Each group comes under the charge of a "Kanoongo" (also known as a "Revenue Inspector)". These villages are put under a village level revenue employee and is known as a "Lekhpal" or "Patwari". This hierarchy is mainly used for administrative activities, including the identification and collection of revenue from land. A separate hierarchy exists for law enforcement in each district.
Until the Twenty-first Amendment of the Constitution of India in 1967, the country recognised 14 official regional languages. The Eighth Schedule and the Seventy-First Amendment provided for the inclusion of Sindhi, Konkani, Meitei and Nepali, thereby increasing the number of official regional languages of India to 18. The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, as of 1 December 2007, lists 22 languages, which are given in the table below together with the speaking population and the regions where they are used. 
The individual states, the borders of most of which are or were drawn on socio-linguistic lines, can legislate their own official languages, depending on their linguistic demographics. The official languages chosen reflect the predominant as well as politically significant languages spoken in that state. Certain states having a linguistically defined territory may have only the predominant language in that state as its official language, examples being Karnataka and Gujarat, which have Kannada and Gujarati as their sole official language respectively. Telangana, with a sizeable Urdu-speaking Muslim population, has two languages, Telugu and Urdu, as its official languages.
The Himalayan states are a group of countries straddling the Himalayan mountain range in Asia. The area is divided between the Western Himalaya and the Eastern Himalaya. Two sovereign states, Nepal and Bhutan, are located almost entirely within the mountain range. The range also covers the southern Tibetan Autonomous Region of China, the Indian Himalayan states of North and Northeast India and northern Pakistan.
Provincial-level administrative divisions () or first-level administrative divisions (), are the highest-level Chinese administrative divisions. There are 34 such divisions, classified as 23 provinces (), four municipalities, five autonomous regions, and two Special Administrative Regions. All but Taiwan Province and a small fraction of Fujian Province (currently administered by the Republic of China) are controlled by the People's Republic of China.
British India had hundreds of Princely States, some 652 in all, but most of them did not issue postage stamps. The stamp-issuing States were of two kinds: the Convention States and the Feudatory States. The postage stamps and postal histories of these States provide great challenges and many rewards to the patient philatelist. Many rarities are to be found here. Although handbooks are available, much remains to be discovered.
The following table lists the names of India in its official languages. The sole official language of India is Hindi in Devanagari script as per Article 343 of the Indian constitution and there is no national language for the country. English has the status of a "subsidiary official language". The Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution lists 22 languages, which have been referred to as "scheduled" languages and given recognition, status, and official encouragement.
The constitution of India was first drafted on January 26, 1950. It is estimated that there are about 1500 languages in India. Article 343–345 declared that the official languages of India for communication with centre will be Hindi and English. There are 22 official languages identified by constitution. Article 345 states that "the Legislature of a state may by law adopt any one or more of the languages in use in the State or Hindi as the language or languages to be used for all or any of the official purposes of that State: Provided that, until the Legislature of the State otherwise provides by law, the English language shall continue to be used for those official purposes within the State for which it was being used immediately before the commencement of this Constitution".
All state governments are modeled after the federal government and consist of three branches (although the three-branch structure is not Constitutionally required): executive, legislative, and judicial. They retain plenary power to make laws covering anything not preempted by the U.S. Constitution, federal statutes, or treaties ratified by the U.S. Senate, and are organized as presidential systems where the governor is both head of government and head of state (even though this too is not required). The various states are then typically subdivided into counties. Louisiana uses the term parish and Alaska uses the term borough for what the Census terms county equivalents in those states.
Eastern Bengal and Assam had a total area of 111,569 sq m and was situated between 20° 45' and 28° 17' N., and between 87° 48' and 97° 5' E. It was bounded by Tibet and the Kingdom of Bhutan to the north, British Burma to the east and the Bay of Bengal to the south. Within these limits, were the princely states of Hill Tippera, Cooch Behar and Manipur.
Hindi is the official languages of the State. Maithili (61 million speakers including Bajjika dialect which has 11 million speakers in India), and Urdu are other recognised languages of the state. Unrecognised languages of the state are Bhojpuri (60 million), Angika (30 million) and Magahi (20 million). Bhojpuri and Magahi are sociolinguistically a part of the Hindi Belt languages fold, thus they were not granted official status in the state.The number of speakers of the Bihari languages is difficult to count because of unreliable sources. In the urban region, most educated speakers of the language name Hindi as their language because this is what they use in formal contexts and believe it to be the appropriate response because of unawareness. The uneducated and the rural population of the region regards Hindi as the generic name for their language.
The provinces of Peru () are the second-level administrative subdivisions of the country. They are divided into districts (). There are 196 provinces in Peru, grouped into 25 regions except for the Lima Province which does not belong to any region. This makes an average of seven provinces per region. The region with the fewest provinces is Callao (one) and the region with the most is Ancash (twenty).
The partition split the Punjab Province (British India) into the two states of West Punjab (Punjab, Pakistan) and East Punjab. However, the historic Majha region is arguably still the same as before since the partition does not change the previous history of Punjab, therefore does not change the geography of the Majha region of the historic Punjab region.
Peru's territory, according to the Regionalization Law which was passed on November 18, 2002, is divided into 26 units: 25 regions "(regiones"; singular: "región)" and the Lima Province. The regions are subdivided into provinces ("provincias"), which are composed of districts ("distritos"). There are 196 provinces and 1 869 districts in Peru.
Peru's territory, according to the Regionalization Law which was passed on 18 November 2002, is divided into 25 regions (regiones). These regions are subdivided into provinces, which are composed of districts. There are a total of 180 provinces and 1747 districts in Peru.
In 1947, India gained independence from the British Empire. The empire was in decline but adapted to these circumstances by creating the British Commonwealth—since 1949 the Commonwealth of Nations—which is a free association of equal states. As India obtained its independence, multiple ethnic conflicts emerged in relation to the formation of a statehood during the Partition of India which resulted in Islamic Pakistan and Secular India. Before the advent of the British, no empire based in mainland India had controlled any part of what now makes up the country's Northeast, part of the reason for the ongoing insurgency in Northeast India. In 1971 Bangladesh obtained independence from Pakistan.
The capital and largest city is Lahore which was the historical capital of the wider Punjab region. Other important cities include Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Gujranwala, Sargodha, Multan, Sialkot, Bahawalpur, Gujrat, Sheikhupura, Jhelum and Sahiwal. The undivided Punjab region was home to six rivers, of which five flow through Pakistan's Punjab province. From west to east, the rivers are: the Indus, Jhelum, Beas, Chenab, Ravi and Sutlej. It is the nation's only province that touches every other province; it also surrounds the federal enclave of the national capital city at Islamabad. In the acronym "P-A-K-I-S-T-A-N", the P is for "Punjab".
A study of the epigraphical records of the Gupta empire shows that there was a hierarchy of administrative divisions from top to bottom. The empire was called by various names such as "Rajya", "Rashtra", "Desha", "Mandala", "Prithvi" and "Avani". It was divided into 26 provinces, which were styled as "Bhukti", "Pradesha" and "Bhoga". Provinces were also divided into "Vishayas" and put under the control of the "Vishayapati"s. A "Vishayapati" administered the "Vishaya" with the help of the "Adhikarana" (council of representatives), which comprised four representatives: "Nagarasreshesthi", "Sarthavaha", "Prathamakulike" and "Prathama Kayastha". A part of the "Vishaya" was called "Vithi". There were also trade links of Gupta business with the Roman empire.
After the Partition of India on 15 August 1947, over 100,000 Sindhi refugees from the newly created Pakistan were relocated in the military camps five kilometres from Kalyan in the Maharashta Region. It was converted into a township in 1949, and named Ulhasnagar by the then Governor-General of India, C. Rajagopalachari. In April 1950, Greater Bombay District came into existence with the merger of Bombay Suburbs and Bombay City. It spanned an area of and inhabited 2,339,000 of people in 1951. The Municipal Corporation limits were extended up to Jogeshwari along the Western Railway and Bhandup along the Central Railway. This limit was further extended in February 1957 up to Dahisar along the Western Railway and Mulund on the Central Railway. In the 1955 "Lok Sabha" discussions, when Bombay State was being re-organised along linguistic lines into the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat. But the States Reorganisation Committee recommended a bi-lingual state for Maharashtra-Gujarat, with Bombay as its capital. However, the Samyukta Maharashtra movement opposed this, and insisted that Bombay native of Marathi be declared the capital of Maharashtra. The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay was established in 1958 at Powai, a northern suburb of Bombay. Following protests by the Samyukta Maharashtra movement in which 105 people were killed by police firing, Maharashtra State was formed with Bombay as its capital on 1 May 1960. Flora Fountain was renamed Hutatma Chowk ("Martyr's Square") as a memorial to the Samyukta Maharashtra movement.
The field services are managed by Postal Circles—generally conforming to each State—except for the North Eastern States, India has been divided into 22 postal circles, each circle headed by a Chief Postmaster General. Each Circle is further divided into Regions comprising field units, called Divisions, headed by a Postmaster General. Further divided into divisions headed by SSPOs & SPOs. further divisions are divided into Sub Divisions Headed by ASPs &IPS. Other functional units like Circle Stamp Depots, Postal Stores Depots and Mail Motor Service may exist in the Circles and Regions.
India, as a vast country, is subdivided into many states and union territories for administrative purpose. Further "divisions" of these states are done into districts. These districts (jilla/zilla) are again divided into many subdivisions, viz tehsils or talukas. These subdivisions are again divided into gram panchayats or village panchayaths. Initially, this was done for collecting land revenue and administration purposes. But now these subdivisions of areas to be governed is followed by other departments of government like education, agriculture, irrigation, health, police, etc. The different departments of state government generally have offices at tehsil or taluka level to facilitate good governance and to provide facilities to common people easily.
The international community considers The state of Jammu and Kashmir divided into three parts occupied by India, Pakistan and a part by China.In June 1947, Sir Cyril Radcliffe set up 2 Boundary Commissions to"demarcate the boundaries of the two parts of the Punjab on the basis of ascertaining the contiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims. In doing so, it will also take into account other factors."At the time, Jammu and Kasmir had 4 million inhabitants, majority, Muslim, with the Maharaja being Hindu. In September 1947, he started a campaign to drive many Muslims out of Kasmir. over 200,00 fled and finally the Muslims rose in rebellion. The Maharaja initially fought back but appealed for assistance to the Governor-General Louis Mountbatten, who agreed on the condition that the ruler accede to India. Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession on 26 October 1947, which was accepted by the Governor General of India the next day. Once the Instrument of Accession was signed, Indian soldiers entered Kashmir with orders to evict the rebels. India took the matter to the United Nations. The UN resolution asked Pakistan to pull its Army out from Kashmir but allowed India to leave only the minimum number of troops needed to keep civil order so that a referendum can be held under UN observation. After the required withdrawal did not occur for several years Jammu & Kashmir National Conference which was the largest political party in the state recommended convening the constituent assembly in a resolution passed on 27 October 1950.[7] On 1 May 1951 Karan Singh then Head of state of Jammu and Kashmir issued a proclamation directing the formation of this assembly. The assembly was to be constituted of elected representatives of the people of the state. For purposes of this election the state was divided into constituencies containing population of 40,000 or as near thereto as possible and each electing one member.[8] The United Nations Security Council stated in its resolution 91 dated 30 March 1951 that it would not consider elections held only in Indian administered Kashmir to be a substitute for a free and impartial plebiscite including the people of the entire state Jammu and Kashmir.[7]
The Indian subcontinent has been ruled by many different ethnic groups throughout its history, each instituting their own policies of administrative division in the region. During the British Raj, the original administrative structure was mostly kept, and India was divided into provinces (also called Presidencies) that were directly governed by the British and princely states which were nominally controlled by a local prince or raja loyal to the British Empire, which held "de facto" sovereignty (suzerainty) over the princely states.