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Rajasthan is India's largest state by area — a land of Thar Desert dunes, Aravalli hills, and Rajput hill-forts, unified from 19 princely states and 3 chiefships between 1948 and 1956, the largest such merger in India's integration. It is best known globally for Jaipur, Jodhpur and Udaipur's palace tourism, but its 21st-century story is increasingly about becoming India's largest generator of solar power on the same desert land that long made it one of the country's poorest and most water-stressed states.

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Rajasthan's integration folded 19 princely states and 3 chiefships into a single Indian state across seven stages between 1948 and 1956 — the largest number of constituent political units merged into any state in India's post-independence integration.

— Rajasthan Legislative Assembly, Integration of Rajasthan; rajras.in

Snapshot

Rajasthan is governed as a standard Indian state with a unicameral 200-seat Legislative Assembly, its politics alternating primarily between the BJP and Indian National Congress. It is home to the Thar Desert (covering roughly 70% of its land area), the ancient Aravalli Range (among the oldest fold-mountain systems on Earth), and a chain of Rajput-built forts and palace cities — Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Bikaner, Chittorgarh — that make it India's most-visited heritage-tourism state. It carries some of India's most persistent development challenges (the lowest per-capita water availability of any state, one of the widest gender-literacy gaps, and a stone-mining silicosis health crisis), alongside one of the country's fastest-growing renewable-energy sectors, now the largest in India by installed solar capacity.