Compare States

Himachal Pradesh is the rare Indian state built almost entirely from scratch — not carved out of a larger unit, but assembled after 1947 from roughly thirty small princely hill kingdoms that had spent centuries paying tribute to whoever held power in the plains below: Mughals, Sikhs, Gorkhas, and finally the British. What emerged is a state with no plains at all, unusually high literacy and a favourable sex ratioThe number of females per 1,000 males in a population — a key demographic indicator in Indian census data. for its region, an economy leaning hard on hydropower, pharmaceuticals and tourism — and, more recently, a fiscal crisis serious enough that the state government has had to claw back its own free- electricity promises.

“

Himachal Pradesh was built by stitching together roughly thirty petty princely hill states into a single Chief Commissioner's Province on 15 April 1948 — and it took 23 more years, and two further territorial mergers, before it became a full state at all.

— Britannica; History of Himachal Pradesh, Wikipedia

Snapshot. HP is governed as a single state with a unicameral Vidhan Sabha seated in Shimla and, since 2017, a winter sitting at Dharamshala/Tapovan — the closest thing India has to a two-capital state. Unusually for a state of its size, HP has no divisional administrative tier: all 12 districts report directly to the state government, a structure that reflects both its small population and its patchwork origins as dozens of separately administered hill kingdoms. It is known, in roughly equal measure, for having been the summer capital of the entire British Indian Empire (Shimla), for hosting the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile (Dharamshala), for an apple economy that gave it the nickname "the Apple State" even though Jammu & Kashmir now produces nearly four times as much fruit, for the Baddi-Barotiwala-Nalagarh belt that manufactures a very large share of India's medicines, and — increasingly — for a public-debt problem serious enough to force cuts to its own signature free-power scheme.