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Maharashtra is India's largest state economy, its financial and entertainment capital, and the direct successor to the Maratha Empire founded by Chhatrapati Shivaji in 1674. Forged as a linguistic state on 1 May 1960 after the bruising Samyukta Maharashtra movement, it stretches from the Konkan coast across the Sahyadri hills to the cotton plains of Vidarbha — a geography that maps almost exactly onto its sharpest fault line: a booming Mumbai-Pune corridor beside a chronically underdeveloped Vidarbha and Marathwada.

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Maharashtra's GSDPGross State Domestic Product — the total value of all goods and services produced within a state in a year. lead over the next-largest state economy, Tamil Nadu, is roughly ₹11 lakh crore — a gap wider than the entire economy of most other Indian states.

— Business Standard; Angel One, citing 2024-25 state GSDPGross State Domestic Product — the total value of all goods and services produced within a state in a year. data

Snapshot

Maharashtra is governed as a standard Indian state, but is one of only six with a bicameral legislature (a 288-seat Vidhan Sabha and a 78-seat Vidhan Parishad). Geographically and economically it splits into a prosperous Konkan-Pune corridor anchored by Mumbai's financial and entertainment industries, and a lagging interior of Vidarbha's cotton belt and Marathwada's drought-prone plains, where farmer distress remains acute. Maharashtra is known nationally for being home to Mumbai (India's financial capital and the heart of the Hindi film industry), the Bombay Stock Exchange, the Maratha fort network built under Shivaji, classical Lavani and Tamasha performance traditions, Ganesh Chaturthi's mass public celebrations, and India's largest Buddhist population, a legacy of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar's 1956 mass conversion at Nagpur.