States and Union Territories of India

There are 29 States and 6 Union territories in the Union of  India as of June, 2014. Political map of India and a quick snapshot of all states and union territories of India is presented below in tabular form.

 Political Map of India – Click on a state to view its page

When India became Independent, an exercise was carried out to abandon British Princely states and provinces and create states based on the language and ethnicity in 1956. Since then many new states have been created and some been merged in the chronology below:

1. Bombay State was split into the linguistic states of Gujarat and Maharashtra on 1 May 1960 by the Bombay Reorganisation Act.
2. Nagaland was made a state on 1 December 1963.
3.  The Punjab Reorganisation Act of 1966 divided the Punjab along linguistic lines, creating a new Hindi-speaking state of Haryana on 1 November, transferring the northern districts of Punjab to Himachal Pradesh, and designatingChandigarh, the shared capital of Punjab and Haryana, a union territory.
4. Statehood was conferred upon Himachal Pradesh on 25 January 1971, Manipur, Meghalaya andTripura on 21 January 1972 the Kingdom of Sikkim joined the Indian Union as a state on 26 April 1975.
5.  In 1987, Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram became states on 20 February, followed by Goa on 30 May, while Goa’s northern exclaves of Daman and Diu became a separate union territory.
   
6. In 2000 three new states were created; Chhattisgarh (1 November 2000) was created out of eastern Madhya Pradesh, Uttaranchal (9 November 2000), which was renamed Uttarakhand in 2007, was created out of the Hilly regions of northwest Uttar Pradesh, and Jharkhand (15 November 2000) was created out of the southern districts of Bihar.

Courtsey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_and_union_territories_of_India