The Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act 2014 is the statute that divided one of India’s largest States into two, and it is read most usefully as two documents bound in one cover. The first document is legal: 108 sections in twelve Parts and thirteen Schedules that created the State of Telangana, preserved a residuary State of Andhra Pradesh, divided legislatures, courts, assets, debts, employees, institutions and river waters between them, and imposed a set of dated obligations on the Union Government. The second document is political, and only part of it is in the Act at all: a sequence of assurances by which the division was made acceptable to the region that stood to lose the capital and the larger share of revenue, the most consequential of which, special category status for the successor State of Andhra Pradesh, was announced by the Prime Minister on the floor of the Rajya Sabha and was never written into the statute that the Rajya Sabha was passing.

That distinction, between what the Act provided and what was said while it was being passed, is the key to every argument the reorganisation has generated since. Claims that sound identical in a speech, that the Centre promised a capital, a package, a status, divide sharply once they are tested against the text. Some were enacted in hard language and can be enforced, audited and litigated. Some were enacted in soft language that obliges the Union to take steps or examine feasibility, and their delivery is measured in decades rather than in court orders. One was not enacted in any language, and its career since 2014, through Finance Commission reports, a special package announced as its equivalent, a governing alliance broken over it and an election fought on it, demonstrates the difference between a political undertaking and a statutory one more clearly than any other episode in Indian legislative history. This article works through the statute provision by provision, then through the record of passage, then through the assurance, and keeps the two ledgers separate throughout, because the confusion of the two is the single largest error in the public discussion of this Act.

The article takes no side between the two successor States. Both advance serious positions, and each is stated in its own terms below. The residuary State’s case is that it surrendered an established capital city and the revenues that went with it on the strength of assurances that have been honoured incompletely. The State of Telangana’s case is that the reorganisation answered a movement with roots in the terms on which the region had been merged in 1956, and that the transitional devices the Act imposed, in particular a Governor exercising individual judgment over law and order in Telangana’s own capital, derogated from the authority of an elected State government. The Union’s case is that its statutory obligations have been discharged to the extent the Act specifies, and that an assurance in debate, however solemn, is not a provision. The statute is the common ground among the three, and the statute is where the analysis begins.

The State that was divided

Andhra Pradesh was itself a product of reorganisation, and its internal geography of grievance was written into its founding. The Telugu-speaking districts of the Madras Presidency had been formed into Andhra State on 1 October 1953, after the fast of Potti Sriramulu, who began his fast in October 1952 and died on 15 December 1952, forced the question of linguistic States onto the national agenda and moved the Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to announce the State’s formation within days. The announcement made every other language region’s demand irresistible, and the States Reorganisation Commission under Fazl Ali was appointed in December 1953 to take the question whole. Andhra’s own capital in that first incarnation was Kurnool, the State having left Madras city behind, which gives the events of 2014 a symmetry the participants noticed: the residuary State of 1953 began in a district town and built its way to a capital, and the residuary State of 2014 was asked to do the same again, this time with the journey measured against a metropolis it had occupied for fifty-eight years. The States Reorganisation Commission, chaired by Fazl Ali, then recommended the merger of Andhra State with the Telangana region of Hyderabad State, and the merger was effected on 1 November 1956 under the States Reorganisation Act of that year, against the Commission’s own recorded hesitation about timing and on the strength of a negotiated document, the Gentlemen’s Agreement of February 1956, which promised safeguards for Telangana in matters such as employment, education, irrigation expenditure and the distribution of ministerial office. The constitutional mechanism that Parliament used in 1956, and would use again in 2014, is the subject of the series guide to State reorganisation in India, which sets out how Article 3 of the Constitution allocates the power; the short version is that Parliament may form a new State by law, that the President must refer the Bill to the legislature of the affected State for its views, and that those views do not bind Parliament.

The safeguards of 1956 were imperfectly kept, and the sense in Telangana that they had been broken produced the first great agitation for separation in 1969, in which students and government employees of the region demanded a separate State and several hundred people died in police firing and related violence. The Union answered with development packages and, after a counter-agitation in 1972 in the coastal and Rayalaseema regions demanding a separate Andhra, with a constitutional settlement: the Constitution (Thirty-second Amendment) Act, 1973 inserted Article 371D, which empowered the President to order equitable opportunities in public employment and education for people belonging to different parts of the State, the arrangement known through the Six-Point Formula. Article 371D matters to this article because the 2014 Act had to decide what became of it, and answered in Section 95 that its admission quotas and common admission process would continue across the division for ten years.

The Commission’s own hesitation deserves recording, because it shows how contingent the 1956 settlement was even at birth. The States Reorganisation Commission had heard the Telangana case in full and had recommended that the region remain, for the time being, a separate State of Hyderabad, with the question of merger to be revisited after the general elections of 1961 and effected only if the Telangana legislature then desired it by a two-thirds majority. The recommendation was not taken. The Congress leadership, committed to linguistic States and persuaded by the Andhra leadership’s assurances, proceeded to immediate merger on the strength of the Gentlemen’s Agreement, and the safeguards that agreement contained were political understandings between leaders rather than enforceable provisions, a few finding statutory form in the regional committee arrangements of the following years and the rest resting on convention. The parallel with 2014 is exact enough to be uncomfortable for every party to both settlements: in 1956 a region accepted a merger on assurances that were not in the statute, and spent two generations arguing that they had been broken; in 2014 a region accepted a division on an assurance that was not in the statute, and began the same argument within the year. The series thesis, that the distance between a statute and what is said about it is where Indian legislative politics lives, was not invented for this article; this State’s history supplies it twice.

The demand for Telangana revived with organisational force when K. Chandrashekar Rao founded the Telangana Rashtra Samithi in 2001 and made statehood a single-point programme. The movement’s decisive phase opened on 29 November 2009, when Rao began a fast, and on 9 December 2009 the Union Home Minister, P. Chidambaram, announced that the process of forming the State of Telangana would be initiated. Protests in the coastal and Rayalaseema regions followed, and on 23 December 2009 the Union announced that the situation had changed and that a consensus would have to be built first. The instrument of consensus-building was a committee of five members appointed in February 2010 and chaired by Justice B. N. Srikrishna, a retired judge of the Supreme Court. The Srikrishna Committee reported on 30 December 2010. It examined six options and recorded its preference for keeping Andhra Pradesh united while creating a statutorily empowered Telangana Regional Council with assured resources for water, irrigation, education and health. Parliament and the Union Government eventually chose the option the Committee had ranked below its preference, full division, and the choice was made by the political organs rather than by the committee process: the Congress Working Committee resolved in favour of a separate Telangana on 30 July 2013, the Union Cabinet approved the division on 3 October 2013, and a Group of Ministers chaired by the Home Minister, Sushilkumar Shinde, was constituted to work out the terms.

Why was Andhra Pradesh divided in 2014?

Andhra Pradesh was divided because the Union Government and Parliament accepted the Telangana movement’s claim, that the region’s grievances under the 1956 merger had persisted through the safeguards of the Gentlemen’s Agreement and Article 371D, and that a separate State was the settlement. The Srikrishna Committee had preferred a united State with a regional council; the decision overrode that preference.

The Bill that emerged from the Group of Ministers was approved by the Union Cabinet on 5 December 2013 and referred by the President to the legislature of Andhra Pradesh for its views, as the proviso to Article 3 requires. The State legislature debated it through December 2013 and January 2014 against a background of strikes, resignations and a suspended normalcy in the assembly’s business. On 30 January 2014 the Legislative Assembly adopted a resolution, moved by the Chief Minister, N. Kiran Kumar Reddy, himself a Congress leader from the residuary region, rejecting the Bill. The rejection had political weight and no legal effect, since Article 3 asks for views and not for consent, a point the series returns to whenever a reorganisation is resisted by the State being divided. The Union Government proceeded, and the manner of the proceeding became part of the reorganisation’s permanent record.

The safeguards question had a second chapter that matters for the 2014 Act, because the Act inherited its machinery. When the Supreme Court upheld the Mulki rules, the residence-based protections for public employment in Telangana, in 1972, the coastal and Rayalaseema regions erupted in the Jai Andhra movement demanding the protections’ removal or a separate Andhra State, and the settlement that ended the confrontation was the Six-Point Formula of 1973, agreed between the Union and the region’s leaders. The Formula abolished the Mulki rules, promised accelerated development of backward areas and a development board, and replaced regional protection with a system of local candidature organised by zones, implemented through the Constitution (Thirty-second Amendment) Act and the Andhra Pradesh Public Employment (Organisation of Local Cadres and Regulation of Direct Recruitment) Order, 1975, issued under Article 371D. That Presidential Order, with its local cadres and its eighty per cent local reservation in specified posts, was still the governing framework for State employment when the State was divided in 2014, which is why the allocation of employees forty years later had to be conducted inside its categories, and why Section 95 of the new Act took such care to continue the admission arrangements founded on the same Article. A division is never only a division of the present; it is a negotiation with every settlement the undivided State had previously made with itself, and the 2014 Act’s drafters had two such settlements, 1956 and 1973, open on the desk beside the map.

The movement’s final decade also explains the speed of the end. Through the 2000s the Telangana question moved from the margins of State politics to its centre: the Bharatiya Janata Party had once supported the demand, the Congress promised consideration of it in its 2004 alliance with the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, the State government appointed the Pranab Mukherjee committee and then the Rosaiah committee to examine it, and the Srikrishna Committee of 2010 was the fourth such exercise. Each committee bought time and none produced a settlement the political system would execute, because the obstacle was never information. It was that the ruling party at the Centre drew its Andhra Pradesh strength from all three regions and would be diminished in two of them by any decision. The events of 2013 broke the paralysis by changing the arithmetic: with a general election due in 2014 and the Telangana Rashtra Samithi’s support in the new State a prize, the Congress Working Committee’s resolution of 30 July 2013 and the Cabinet’s approval of 3 October converted a demand into a timetable. The Group of Ministers under Sushilkumar Shinde worked through the winter on the division’s terms, and the Congress appointed a further committee under A. K. Antony to hear the grievances of its own Seemandhra leadership, whose members were resigning from ministries and from the party as the Bill advanced. The opposition the Bill met in the State was therefore not an opposition between parties but within them, which shaped everything about its passage: a Congress Chief Minister moved the resolution rejecting a Congress government’s Bill, Congress members from the residuary region disrupted the Congress government’s introduction of it, and its passage depended on the votes of the national opposition.

Passage: thirteen days in February

The parliamentary passage of the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Bill occupied eight days and left a record that both successor States still cite, one as evidence of sacrifice and the other as evidence of how completely the demand had prevailed. The Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 13 February 2014 by the Home Minister amid scenes that are a matter of the House’s own record: slogan-shouting by members opposed to the division, a member, Lagadapati Rajagopal, discharging pepper spray in the chamber, the suspension of sixteen members, and adjournment. On 18 February 2014 the Lok Sabha passed the Bill by voice vote. The live telecast of the proceedings was interrupted while the Bill was taken up, the doors of the chamber were closed, and members of the opposition who supported the Bill’s object, principally the Bharatiya Janata Party, voted with the government while complaining of the procedure. The Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Sushma Swaraj, recorded that she had supported Telangana while being unable to say whether the Bill had been properly introduced. The residuary State’s political class described the day in terms that entered its permanent vocabulary, and the description of the passage that the brief for this article permits is the factual one: passed by the House of the People on 18 February 2014 in circumstances that were the subject of significant contemporaneous objection concerning the conduct of proceedings.

Outside Parliament the residuary regions conducted the largest mobilisation of the whole episode, the Samaikyandhra movement, which shut the thirteen districts in waves of general strike through the autumn of 2013, drew government employees, teachers and students into a strike that lasted weeks, and filled the Assembly debate of December and January with the knowledge that the House’s own staff and much of its membership were divided in fact. Union ministers from the residuary region resigned their offices, members of Parliament from the region resigned or threatened to, and the State’s parties split along the regional line irrespective of ideology, so that the Congress, the Telugu Desam and the YSR Congress each faced the Bill as a question of survival in one region or the other. The mobilisation failed in its object and succeeded in its secondary object, which was to raise the price of the division until the Union paid it in the currency of assurances. The sequence is worth stating because it explains the Rajya Sabha evening better than any account of drafting can: the package the Prime Minister announced was the settlement of a strike as much as the settlement of a debate, and the residuary State has measured its delivery ever since by the standard applicable to settlements, not to speeches.

The Rajya Sabha took up the Bill on 20 February 2014, in a debate that was fuller and in which the government needed, and obtained, the support of the principal opposition party. Two features of that debate have permanent significance for the statute. The first is constitutional. The Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Arun Jaitley, supported the creation of Telangana but objected to Section 8, the provision giving the Governor a special responsibility for the common capital exercisable in his individual judgment, arguing that a law-and-order power of that kind over a State subject could not be created by ordinary legislation and required a constitutional amendment. The government did not accept the objection, the provision was retained, and the question Jaitley raised was never adjudicated, because Section 8 was never the subject of a definitive court ruling during its life. The second feature is the statement with which the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, closed the government’s case, announcing a package of measures for the residuary State of which the first and most remembered was special category status. That statement is analysed in full in the section devoted to it below; here it is enough to fix its procedural position. It was made on the floor of the Council of States during the debate on the Bill, in reply to the debate, and it was not moved as an amendment, not incorporated in the Bill, and not voted on. The Rajya Sabha passed the Bill the same day, 20 February 2014. The President, Pranab Mukherjee, gave assent on 1 March 2014, and the Act, Act 6 of 2014, was published for general information the same day. Section 2 defined the appointed day, and the day notified was 2 June 2014, on which the two successor States came into being.

The State legislature’s rejection deserves one further paragraph, because it is the point on which the passage is most often misdescribed. When the Bill reached the Lok Sabha, the Chief Minister whose assembly had rejected it resigned, on 19 February 2014, the day after the Lok Sabha’s vote, and the undivided State spent the reorganisation’s final weeks under President’s rule, imposed at the beginning of March 2014, with the Governor administering the State that was about to become two. The Rajya Sabha debate, for its part, was not the formality the Lok Sabha’s had been. Amendments were moved, including by members of the Bharatiya Janata Party, to write into the Bill the substance of what the government was offering the residuary State, and they were rejected by voice vote; the government’s majority for the Bill depended on a party whose amendments it was defeating, an arrangement the Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Sitaram Yechury described on the record as match-fixing between the two national parties. That contemporary characterisation is set down here because the brief for this article requires the passage to be described from the record, and the record includes it: a Bill passed by one House in a sealed and unscreened chamber and by the other on the strength of a statement that was not an amendment. The appointed day then did its quiet work. Whatever the manner of the passage, the legal consequences all ran from 2 June 2014, and the passage controversies survive as politics rather than as law, since no court was asked to, or could, unmake a State for defects in the debate that created it.

What the Act created

Part II of the Act performs the reorganisation itself. Section 3 formed the State of Telangana out of ten districts of the existing State: Adilabad, Karimnagar, Medak, Nizamabad, Warangal, Rangareddi, Nalgonda, Mahbubnagar, Hyderabad, and Khammam with a specified exclusion of certain revenue villages in some of its mandals, an exclusion whose purpose was connected with the Polavaram project and which an amendment within months would enlarge. Section 4 provided that the State of Andhra Pradesh would comprise the territories of the existing State other than those specified in Section 3, which is the drafting technique of residuary definition: Andhra Pradesh was not listed district by district but took everything the section on Telangana did not take, thirteen districts in all. The First and Fourth Schedules of the Constitution were amended accordingly, and the Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the Act itself amended the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order and the Constitution (Scheduled Tribes) Order so that the lists of castes and tribes applied intelligibly in each successor State.

Representation was reallocated in the same Part and the next. In the Council of States the successor State of Andhra Pradesh received eleven seats and Telangana seven. In the House of the People, Andhra Pradesh received twenty-five seats and Telangana seventeen. The Legislative Assembly of the residuary State was constituted with 175 seats and that of Telangana with 119, and the Legislative Councils with fifty and forty seats respectively. The Act directed the Election Commission to undertake the delimitation of constituencies for the two States within the frozen national framework, and it carried the sitting members of the undivided legislatures and of Parliament across to the successor bodies by allocation, so that no election was required to populate the new institutions on the appointed day. One subject the Act conspicuously did not settle was the enhancement of assembly seats in the residuary State, an increase from 175 to 225 that figured in the political commitments surrounding the Bill and that the constitutional freeze on delimitation, which runs until the first census taken after 2026, places beyond the reach of an ordinary reorganisation statute. The Government of Andhra Pradesh’s later stocktaking listed assembly seats among the assurances that remained unimplemented, which is where, as a matter of law, the matter had to rest: the promise concerned something a reorganisation Act could not by itself deliver.

The allocation of sitting members was the Act’s most delicate representational exercise, because it had to be accomplished without a vote. The eighteen members of the Council of States returned by the undivided State’s electoral college were distributed between the successor States to match the new allocation of eleven and seven, the members of the House of the People were assigned to the Lok Sabha seats of the State in which their constituencies lay, and the members of the undivided Legislative Assembly and Legislative Council took their seats in the successor legislatures on the same territorial principle, which is why the Assembly elections held alongside the general election of 2014 could be conducted for the undivided State and their results sorted into two legislatures on the appointed day. The first legislatures of the two States were therefore elected bodies with a divided inheritance rather than nominated stopgaps, a point of democratic substance: Telangana’s first government took office on the appointed day itself under K. Chandrashekar Rao with a mandate won in the undivided election, and the residuary State’s government under N. Chandrababu Naidu followed within the week. Delimitation proper, the redrawing of constituency boundaries to match the new States, was committed to the Election Commission, which conducted it within the national freeze on the total number of seats, so that each successor State’s constituencies were its share of the undivided map redrawn along the border rather than a fresh apportionment between them.

For the judiciary, Section 30 continued the High Court of Judicature at Hyderabad as the common High Court for both successor States until a separate High Court was constituted for Andhra Pradesh under Article 214, with the judges of the existing court becoming judges of the common court and the expenditure on their salaries and allowances allocated between the two States on the basis of the population ratio. The arrangement lasted four and a half years: the Andhra Pradesh High Court was constituted separately and began functioning at Amaravati on 1 January 2019, and the court at Hyderabad became the High Court for the State of Telangana alone. The Act’s general machinery for legal continuity sits in its closing Part: existing laws continued in force in both States until altered, Section 101 empowered the appropriate government for two years to adapt and modify laws by order to facilitate their application in the successor State, proceedings pending on the appointed day continued against the appropriate successor State, and a removal of difficulties power allowed the Centre to smooth the transition by order. These are the unglamorous provisions that decide whether a division produces administrative chaos, and in this reorganisation they worked: there was no day on which either State lacked a functioning body of law.

The Act’s financial Parts complete the picture of what was created. Part V authorised expenditure from the Consolidated Fund of the existing State for the part-year up to the appointed day and made corresponding provision for the successor States, so that government never lacked lawful authority to spend. The revenue Part carried the distribution of the proceeds of taxes and duties between the States and provided for the apportionment of tax arrears, refunds and recoveries, the unglamorous provisions over which the two finance departments would argue for years, since a tax assessed in Hyderabad on income earned in Vijayawada has to belong somewhere and the Act’s answer, a mixture of location and ratio, could be applied to the same rupee in two ways by two interested parties. Part VI’s single provision, Section 46, sent the larger fiscal question to the Fourteenth Finance Commission, whose separate awards for the two States, made in its report of December 2014, set the devolution and grant framework within which both States began their existence, including a revenue deficit grant for the residuary State whose size relative to the State’s own estimate of its first-year gap became one of the standard counters in the special category argument. The Act also carried the existing State’s budget across the division, continued its appropriations, and preserved the authority of its pending finance legislation in each successor State until the new legislatures acted, the standard technique of reorganisation drafting, executed here without the fiscal cliff that a less careful statute might have produced on the first morning.

How the statute is put together

A reader who wants the Act’s whole shape before its details can take it in twelve movements, and the movements themselves teach something about how Parliament divides a State. Part I, Sections 1 and 2, is preliminary: the short title and the definitions, among which two do disproportionate work, the appointed day, the hinge on which every provision swings, and the population ratio, the Act’s universal solvent. Part II, Sections 3 to 12, performs the territorial reorganisation and its constitutional consequences: the two States, the common capital, the expert committee, the common Governor, the Governor’s special responsibility, and amendments to the Constitution’s First and Fourth Schedules with the consequential changes to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Orders. Part III, Sections 13 to 29, rebuilds representation: the Council of States and House of the People allocations, the strength of the two Legislative Assemblies and Councils, the allocation of sitting members, and the delimitation of constituencies by the Election Commission within the national freeze. Part IV, Sections 30 to 42, deals with the High Court: the common court at Hyderabad, its judges, its jurisdiction over pending cases and the allocation of its expenditure. Part V, Sections 43 to 45, authorises expenditure across the transition, and the revenue provisions carry the distribution of taxes, duties, arrears and refunds. Section 46 stands at the head of the financial settlement and sends the residuary questions to the Finance Commission.

Part VII, Sections 47 to 67, is the apportionment code proper: the division of assets and liabilities, land and goods, treasury balances, investments, public debt, contracts and proceedings, with the reference of disputes to the Central Government built in. Part VIII, Sections 68 to 75, handles the collective assets, the companies and corporations of the Ninth Schedule and the institutions of the Tenth Schedule, whose human and institutional continuity Section 75 protects. The services Part, Sections 76 to 83, allocates the employees and constitutes the advisory machinery through which the allocation was made, and preserves the conditions of service and the operation of Article 371D within the new map. Part X, Sections 84 to 91, is the water code described above. Part XI, Sections 92 to 95 in substance, holds the Union’s developmental obligations and the educational safeguard. The closing Part, Sections 96 to 108, is the machinery of continuity: pending legal proceedings, the territorial extent of existing laws, the power to adapt laws, the power of courts to construe, the treatment of the State’s officers and records, and the removal of difficulties. Read as a sequence, the Parts move from the most political questions, territory and capital, through representation and institutions, to the questions that are merely, and vitally, administrative, and the bulk of the Act by section count lies in the administrative two-thirds. That distribution is the statute’s honest self-portrait: the politics of a division can be settled in twenty sections, but its consequences occupy ninety.

One more structural observation connects the drafting to the disputes. The Act is generous with transition periods and economical with enforcement machinery. It fixes the ten-year terms for the capital, the admissions and the power arrangements with precision, and those terms were kept because a date enforces itself. Where performance depended on the continuing cooperation of two governments or on the Union’s discretion, in apportionment, in the Schedule IX and X divisions, in the port and the steel plant, the Act provided principles, committees and references rather than deadlines and sanctions, and those are the items whose status columns stayed open. A reader testing any future reorganisation Bill should apply the lesson mechanically: find the provisions that carry their own dates, and the provisions that carry only their own sentiments, and the implementation record a decade later can be predicted from the drafting alone.

The common capital: a city held in suspense

The provision that most distinguished this reorganisation from those that had gone before was Section 5. Hyderabad, the capital of the undivided State and the seat of its economic life, lay deep inside the territory allotted to Telangana. The residuary State, which had contributed to building the city and whose people staffed much of its administration and owned much of its property, could not be removed from it overnight, and Telangana could not be asked to wait for its own capital. Section 5 therefore provided that on and from the appointed day Hyderabad would be the common capital of the State of Telangana and the State of Andhra Pradesh for such period not exceeding ten years, and that after the expiry of that period Hyderabad would be the capital of Telangana and there would be a new capital for Andhra Pradesh. An Explanation defined the common capital as the existing area notified as the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation, so the shared territory was the municipal city and not the district or the metropolitan region at large. Section 6 required the Central Government to constitute an expert committee to study the alternatives for a new capital for the successor State of Andhra Pradesh and to report within six months of enactment. Section 94, in the fiscal Part, added the Union’s supporting obligations: special financial support for the creation of essential facilities in the new capital, expressly including the Raj Bhawan, the High Court, the Government Secretariat, the Legislative Assembly and the Legislative Council, and a facility to denotify degraded forest land if that was considered necessary for the new capital’s creation.

The comparison that exposes what was unusual here is with the reorganisations of 2000, which created Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand without sharing any capital at all, as the account of the new States created in 2000 shows in detail. Raipur, Ranchi and Dehradun were available, imperfect but functioning seats of administration, and the parent States retained their own capitals undisturbed. The one precedent for sharing was older and more cautionary: Chandigarh, built as Punjab’s capital, was made a Union territory and the common capital of Punjab and Haryana by the Punjab Reorganisation Act 1966, an arrangement conceived as transitional that has outlived every participant in its drafting, because a Union territory has no sunset and the transfer of the city to Punjab, promised in later settlements, was never executed. The drafters of 2014 knew the precedent and designed against it. Hyderabad would be no Union territory, Telangana’s title to its capital was written into the section itself, and the sharing was given the one feature Chandigarh never had, a statutory expiry. In 2014 the parent State thus lost its capital to the successor under a timetable, a configuration with no precedent in the reorganisation history of the Republic, and the Act’s answer, a decade of shared occupancy with a sunset, purchased time at the price of a ten-year argument about whose city it was in the meantime. The sunset was a hard one. The ten years ran from the appointed day, 2 June 2014, and the period expired at the beginning of June 2024, from which date Hyderabad is the capital of Telangana alone and the common capital provisions, with everything built on them, spent their force by the Act’s own terms. Descriptions of the arrangement as indefinite, or as continuing until Andhra Pradesh chooses to leave, misstate the section: the Act fixed an outer limit, not an option.

When did Hyderabad stop being the common capital of the two States?

Hyderabad stopped being the common capital when the period fixed by Section 5 ran out. The section capped the arrangement at ten years from the appointed day, 2 June 2014, so the status expired at the beginning of June 2024, and from that point Hyderabad is the capital of Telangana alone, as Section 5(2) had provided from the start.

The expert committee that Section 6 required was constituted under the chairmanship of K. C. Sivaramakrishnan, a former Union Urban Development Secretary, with members drawn from public finance, urban studies and planning, and it reported at the end of August 2014. Its advice ran against the instincts of capital-building. The committee cautioned against concentrating the capital’s functions in a single new mega city, warned of the environmental and acquisition costs of the options before it, and favoured a distributed pattern in which the capital region in the Vijayawada and Guntur area would hold the core institutions while other functions and investments were spread across the successor State’s regions. The Government of Andhra Pradesh took a different course. It chose a greenfield capital, Amaravati, on the southern bank of the Krishna in Guntur district, enacted a State law creating a capital region development authority, assembled the land through a land pooling scheme in which landowners contributed plots in return for developed plots and annuities, and had the foundation stone laid by the Prime Minister on 22 October 2015. The capital question then outlived the government that answered it. Following the change of government in the State in 2019, the Andhra Pradesh legislature enacted a decentralisation law in 2020 that proposed three seats of governance, an executive capital at Visakhapatnam, the legislative capital at Amaravati and the judicial capital at Kurnool, and repealed that law in 2021. In March 2022 the Andhra Pradesh High Court, in proceedings brought by farmers who had pooled their land, held that the State was bound to develop the capital city and capital region at Amaravati in accordance with the statutory scheme under which the land had been taken, and directed that the development be completed within the timelines the judgment fixed. The State carried the matter to the Supreme Court. The capital of the residuary State, the subject of Section 5’s second sentence and Section 94’s support provisions, thus remained a live legal and political question long after the common capital itself had expired on schedule, which is the opposite of what the provision’s drafters can have intended: the transition they time-limited was completed, and the destination they left open was not.

The decade of sharing had a daily administrative texture that the section’s brevity conceals. The Secretariat of the undivided State, its heads of departments and its directorates, had to be physically divided between two governments occupying the same complex, with floors, blocks and buildings allotted between them, an exercise in which the management and allocation of Government buildings, the least quoted limb of Section 8, did steady practical work. The residuary State’s government progressively relocated its functioning to its own territory, establishing an interim government complex at Velagapudi in the capital region and moving the Secretariat there in 2016, so that for most of the common capital period Hyderabad was a capital in law for Andhra Pradesh and a workplace in fact for a shrinking share of its administration. The elected governments met, legislated and budgeted in the shared city in the first years, the residuary Assembly holding its sessions in Hyderabad until its own legislature buildings in the capital region were ready, and the two police forces, the two intelligence establishments and the two protocol departments had to coexist in one metropolitan jurisdiction, which is the practical background against which a provision about the security of life, liberty and property in the common capital area should be read. Shared capitals fail, when they fail, at the level of the police station and the government quarter rather than the constitution, and the drafters of Section 8, whatever the provision’s defects, had understood where the strain would come.

One asymmetry inside the sharing deserves a paragraph of its own, because it conditioned everything else. The common capital was a capital, not a polity: the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation continued as a single municipal body under the law of the State in whose territory the city lay, which after the appointed day meant Telangana, so that the residents of the common capital, including the residuary State’s ministers, legislators and employees, were municipal citizens of Telangana, voting in its local elections and governed locally by its institutions, while their own State’s government sat in the city as a tenant of the settlement. The Act did not attempt to give the common capital a government of its own, as a Union territory would have had, and the absence was deliberate, since a separate capital administration would have reproduced the Chandigarh arrangement the drafters were avoiding. The consequence was that the only all-city authority the Act created above the municipal and State machinery of Telangana was the Governor acting under Section 8, which is why that section, and not any provision about buildings or boundaries, became the settlement’s centre of gravity.

The Governor’s special responsibility

Sections 7 and 8 built the constitutional oddity at the centre of the common capital arrangement. Section 7 provided that the Governor of the existing State of Andhra Pradesh would be the Governor for both successor States for such period as the President determined, an arrangement under which E. S. L. Narasimhan, the incumbent, served as common Governor until separate Governors were appointed for the two States in 2019. Section 8 then gave that Governor a responsibility no Indian Governor holds as a matter of ordinary constitutional practice. For the purposes of administration of the common capital area, the Governor was to have special responsibility for the security of life, liberty and property of all those who reside in that area. The responsibility extended in particular to law and order, internal security and the security of vital installations, and to the management and allocation of Government buildings in the common capital area. In discharging it, the Governor was to act, after consulting the Council of Ministers of the State of Telangana, in his individual judgment, and a proviso made his decision final on any question whether a matter was one in which he was required to act in his individual judgment, with the validity of anything he did protected against challenge on that ground. He was to be assisted by two advisors appointed by the Central Government.

What could the Governor do in Hyderabad that a Governor ordinarily cannot?

Under Section 8 the Governor held a special responsibility for the security of life, liberty and property in the common capital area, extending to law and order, internal security, vital installations and Government buildings, exercised in his individual judgment after consulting the Telangana ministry, not on its aid and advice in the ordinary way.

The provision’s logic was protective and was understood as such by its drafters: the residents of Hyderabad included a very large number of people from the residuary State, including its entire government, and the arrangement assured them that the police of the city in which they lived and worked would answer, in the last resort, to an authority that was not the government of either successor State alone. Its cost was equally plain, and Telangana’s political leadership stated it from the beginning: law and order is a State subject, the city was Telangana’s capital and its territory, and a Governor empowered to act in his individual judgment over the capital’s policing derogated from the authority of Telangana’s elected government in its own seat. Arun Jaitley’s objection in the Rajya Sabha debate, that such a power required a constitutional amendment because Parliament could not by ordinary law withdraw a State subject from a State government’s control and vest it in a Governor’s discretion, gave the objection its most precise legal form. The objection was never tested, because the power was never exercised in a manner that produced litigation, and the controversy it generated was political and administrative rather than judicial.

That controversy arrived in June 2015, a year into the arrangement, attached to a criminal case. The Telangana Anti-Corruption Bureau had arrested a legislator of the Telugu Desam Party in what became known as the cash-for-vote case, and recordings said to include the voice of the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, were broadcast; the Government of Andhra Pradesh alleged that its leaders’ telephones had been tapped by the Telangana police. On 9 June 2015 the Andhra Pradesh Cabinet resolved to represent to the Centre that law and order in the joint capital should be managed by the Governor as the Reorganisation Act provided, and to seek an enquiry into the alleged tapping. The Attorney General’s advice was sought in the exchanges that followed, and the position attributed to the Governor’s office and the Centre was that Section 8 meant what it said. Telangana’s government, led by K. Chandrashekar Rao, rejected the premise entirely, treating any activation of Section 8 as an intrusion on its authority, and the section was in the event never formally invoked to take over the capital’s policing. The episode fixed the provision’s real character. It was drafted as a guarantee and functioned as an argument: each government cited it for what it proved about the other’s conduct, and the Governor’s individual judgment, the mechanism meant to stand above the dispute, was the one thing neither side could afford to see used. When the common capital period expired, Section 8 expired with the arrangement it served, its central legal question unanswered and its political work, for good and ill, complete.

The drafting choice had a known alternative, and the choice is the measure of Jaitley’s objection. Where the Constitution itself wishes a Governor to hold a special responsibility for law and order, it says so in terms: Article 371H, for Arunachal Pradesh, gives the Governor a special responsibility with respect to law and order, to be discharged in his individual judgment after consulting the Council of Ministers, in language Section 8 closely follows. The existence of that template, inside the Constitution, is what made the 2014 device contestable: the government had reproduced a constitutional provision’s machinery in an ordinary statute, in relation to the largest State subject of all, on the argument that Parliament’s reorganisation power under Articles 3 and 4, which permits supplemental and consequential provisions including provisions that are not strictly amendments of the Constitution, carried the device with it. The argument was never absurd, reorganisation Acts have always adjusted constitutional arrangements for the States they remake, and it was never answered, because the device was never used in a way a court could seize. The provision accordingly stands in the statute book as a settled text with an unsettled pedigree, and for the ten years of its life it functioned, as its critics predicted and its defenders intended, entirely in the subjunctive: a power whose existence altered behaviour precisely because nobody wished to discover its limits.

Dividing the assets of an undivided State

A reorganisation Act is, in bulk, an apportionment machine, and Parts VII and VIII of this one run from Section 47 to Section 75. The machine’s unit of account is defined at the front of the Act: Section 2(h) provides that the population ratio, in relation to the States of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, means the ratio of 58.32 to 41.68 as per the 2011 Census, the larger share belonging to the residuary State. That single definition does work across the whole statute. Assets and liabilities that were not tied to a location were apportioned between the successor States in the population ratio; assets fixed in place, land, buildings, project works, went with the territory in which they lay; the public debt of the undivided State was apportioned on the same basis with adjustments, and the residuary State carried the undivided liability on its books in the interim, a mechanical feature of the scheme that Andhra Pradesh’s later accounts presented as a grievance, its 2018 white paper putting the undivided loan liability carried in its books at over Rs. 33,478 crore pending division. Cash balances, tax arrears and refunds were distributed by a combination of location and ratio that the two States disputed in application, the residuary State claiming in the same document a loss of about Rs. 3,800 crore from the allocation of refunds on the population basis while deferred collections were taken on a location basis. Section 66 provided for the reference of apportionment questions to the Central Government, which made the Union the standing arbiter of a division it had itself designed, a structural feature that explains much of the tone of the later correspondence between the two States and the Centre.

The companies and corporations of the undivided State were handled through the Ninth Schedule, which listed 89 State public sector undertakings and corporations whose assets and liabilities Section 68 subjected to apportionment, on the population ratio as the default and subject to agreement between the States and directions of the Central Government. The schedule’s most argued entry was the Singareni Collieries Company, the coal mining company whose pits lie in Telangana and whose equity was held 51 per cent by the undivided State and 49 per cent by the Government of India. The State’s shareholding was allotted to Telangana on the location principle, and the residuary State’s white paper recorded its objection in terms that capture the recurring pattern of the whole apportionment: a Schedule IX company, it argued, should have been divided like the others, and the location principle had been applied where it hurt Andhra Pradesh and the population principle where it hurt Andhra Pradesh too. The apportionment of the Schedule IX companies as a class was among the items the same white paper recorded as not implemented years after the appointed day, with the division of many undertakings still awaiting agreement or direction. The Tenth Schedule performed a different function. It listed 107 institutions, training establishments, research bodies and similar entities, in relation to which Section 75 provided for the continuance of facilities: the institutions would continue to serve the people of both States for a transitional period, so that a nursing college, a police academy or a research institute situated in one State would not slam its doors on the other State’s trainees on the appointed day. Bifurcation of the Schedule X institutions themselves, as distinct from continued access to them, also remained on the residuary State’s list of uncompleted items.

The machinery for working the apportionment was administrative and continuous rather than judicial and final. The Union Home Ministry, which had piloted the Bill, retained a reorganisation desk that serviced the division for years, convening the two States’ chief secretaries, maintaining the lists of assets and institutions under division, and recording agreements item by item as inventories were completed and valuations settled. Some classes of assets divided almost silently because a rule and a register existed for them, government securities, provident funds and pension liabilities being worked out between the two finance departments and the Accountant General’s offices on the Act’s principles. The classes that resisted were those where the asset was indivisible, a building, a company, a brand, a training institution with one campus and two claimant States, or where the rule itself was double-edged, as with Singareni, where location and ratio pointed to different answers and each State’s reading of the Act was the reading that favoured it. The residuary State’s complaint, examined closely, is rarely that the Act gave no answer; it is that the answer required the other side’s consent or the Centre’s direction, and that consent and direction arrived slowly or not at all. That is a complaint about the design of the machine, and it is well founded in the text: the drafters, working in weeks, built a division that a decade of administration could not quite finish, because they had distributed the finishing of it among parties whose interests the division itself had made adverse.

Two features of this machinery deserve emphasis because they recur in every dispute under the Act. The first is that the Act specified principles, ratios and forums, but for hundreds of individual assets it could not specify outcomes, because the outcomes depended on inventories, valuations and agreements that only the two administrations could produce, and the two administrations were by then parties with opposed interests. Apportionment under this Act was therefore never going to be an event; it was a process with a long tail, and the honest measure of the Act is not that the tail existed but how much of it was cleared and how much was still being argued over a decade later. The second is that the security forces received their own treatment, reflecting the fact that Andhra Pradesh’s anti-extremist apparatus was a shared asset of unusual sensitivity: the Greyhounds training centre was to be administered by the Central Government for three years, a new training centre was to be established for the residuary State, and the Greyhounds and OCTOPUS forces were to be divided on the basis of the options of the personnel. Even this item appeared in the residuary State’s 2018 stocktaking among the assurances not implemented, which indicates how far the long tail extended beyond money into the coercive apparatus of the two States.

The apportionment Parts also had to answer questions that arise in litigation rather than in accounts. Contracts entered into by the undivided State continued, with the successor State in whose territory the contract’s purpose lay substituted as the party, and rights and liabilities under them followed the same logic. Legal proceedings pending on the appointed day did not abate; the appropriate successor State was substituted, a provision that quietly transferred thousands of writ petitions, service cases and land disputes from a court and a government that had ceased to exist to the two that had replaced them. Property held outside the State’s territory posed its own problem, most visibly in New Delhi, where Andhra Pradesh Bhavan, the undivided State’s establishment in the national capital, had to be divided between the successor States. The division of the Bhavan’s premises remained on the residuary State’s list of unimplemented items in 2018, a small fact with a large symbolism: a decade’s argument about two States’ shares could be conducted, in the end, over the partition of a single building’s rooms, because apportionment at that scale admits no principle that both sides experience as fair, only a surveyor’s line that one side experiences as loss.

Power, coal and the shared grid

The undivided State’s energy system was a single machine, and the Act’s treatment of it, principally through Section 92 and the Twelfth Schedule, shows the drafters choosing continuity over division wherever the machine could not be cut. The successor States were bound to follow the principles, guidelines, directions and orders of the Central Government on coal, oil and natural gas and on power generation, transmission and distribution as enumerated in the Schedule. The power of central generating stations was allotted between the States in the ratio of the actual energy consumption of the distribution companies in each State over the preceding five years, a consumption basis rather than the population ratio, chosen because electricity follows load and not headcount. The maintenance of inter-state transmission lines was left with each State within its jurisdiction. For ten years, the successor State with a deficit of electricity was to have the first right of refusal over the other’s surplus, a transitional solidarity clause of the same family as Section 95’s admission quotas. The distribution companies themselves were re-mapped, the Schedule recording that the districts of Anantapur and Kurnool, which had fallen within the central distribution company’s area, would be reassigned to the southern distribution company of the residuary State.

Coal joined the two States in the asset that mattered most to Telangana’s economy. The Singareni Collieries, whose mines lie across the Godavari valley districts of Telangana, employed more people and carried more regional meaning than any other undertaking in the Ninth Schedule, and its allotment to Telangana on the location principle, with the Union retaining its 49 per cent shareholding, was both the most defensible application of that principle in the entire apportionment and the one the residuary State cited most bitterly, because the same principle that delivered Singareni whole to Telangana was refused, in Andhra Pradesh’s reading, where it would have delivered value the other way. The energy provisions as a whole worked better than the financial ones, and the reason is instructive: electricity systems generate their own daily facts, metered and settled, and a division rule applied to metered flows leaves less room for the decade of interpretive argument that attended the division of balances, arrears and institutions, where every figure required an inventory and every inventory could be disputed.

Dividing the people: the services

Part VIII of the Act, Sections 76 to 83, addressed the human apportionment, the allocation of the undivided State’s employees between the successor States. Section 77 vested the allocation of State service personnel in the Central Government, to be carried out on the recommendations of an advisory committee, and Section 80 empowered the constitution of that committee. The committee was constituted on 29 March 2014 under the chairmanship of C. R. Kamalanathan, a retired officer of the Indian Administrative Service, and became known by his name. Its task, set by its terms of reference, was to delineate objective and transparent criteria, to determine cadre strengths for the two States category by category, and to recommend individual allocations, hearing representations from affected employees. All India Services officers were handled separately, through a committee chaired by Pratyush Sinha, a former Central Vigilance Commissioner.

The guidelines the process produced are a study in how a statute’s abstractions are converted into individual fates. Posts that served one State exclusively went with that State. State-level posts, in the Secretariat, the heads of departments and State institutions, were divided in the population ratio, subject to a geographic intensity exception for departments whose activity did not conform to population. Employees were invited to express options for the State they wished to serve, options were weighed with seniority as on the eve of the appointed day, local candidature principles drawn from the Article 371D framework informed the exercise, and the Central Government retained the power to allot an employee to either State in the administrative interest, option or no option. The parallel allocation of the All India Services, conducted through the committee chaired by Pratyush Sinha, distributed the Indian Administrative Service, Indian Police Service and Indian Forest Service cadres of the undivided State between the two new cadres, so that the successor States began with district administrations and police leaderships of their own from the appointed day. Below the State services stood the larger penumbra the Act handled by other means: the employees of the public sector undertakings followed their companies into the Ninth Schedule’s apportionment, the staff of the Tenth Schedule institutions followed the continuance arrangements of Section 75, university and college teachers were caught between the services framework and the institutions framework and litigated in both characters, and the police forces, including the specialised Greyhounds and OCTOPUS units, were divided with an eye to the options of personnel whose skills had been built for a single theatre of operations. The guidelines’ local candidature provisions drew on the deepest well of grievance in the whole exercise, since the question whether an employee counted as local to Telangana or to the residuary State, answered by the Presidential Order’s framework of study and residence, decided not only postings but, in the employees’ own understanding, belonging. Allocation orders were issued in tranches over the following years, tentative first and final later, and the interval between the two, in which a family could not know in which State its earner would retire, was the human form of the apportionment’s long tail.

The scale was large, roughly 51,000 State services employees within the committee’s remit, and the exercise necessarily generated dissatisfaction in exact proportion to its size. Its judicial aftermath is considered below; here the point is structural. A reorganisation statute cannot allocate people the way it allocates furniture, because each allocation is a posting, a domicile, a school admission and a retirement record, and the Act’s design choice, criteria published in advance, options invited, representations heard, an advisory committee interposed between the two governments and the individual, was the most defensible version of an indefensible necessity. Where the process failed individuals, it failed them inside a framework that at least told them the rule by which they had been failed, which is why so much of the resulting litigation turned on the framework’s own terms: whether an allocation was tentative or final, whether an option once given could be withdrawn, and whether the criteria had been applied as published.

Water: boards, an apex council, and a tribunal kept alive

The two successor States share two great river systems, the Krishna and the Godavari, and the undivided State’s irrigation civilisation, its dams at Nagarjuna Sagar and Srisailam, its delta barrages, its lift schemes, was built across what became the border. Part X of the Act, Sections 84 to 91, therefore built a permanent institutional layer over the shared rivers rather than attempting to divide the water itself. Section 84 required the Central Government to constitute an Apex Council for the supervision of the functioning of the two river management boards the Part created, the Godavari River Management Board and the Krishna River Management Board. The boards were given jurisdiction over the headworks, barrages, dams, reservoirs, regulating structures, canal networks and transmission lines of the projects specified for the purpose, which the Eleventh Schedule listed, and their functions included the regulation of water and power releases in accordance with the awards of tribunals, the appraisal of new projects, and the administration of the listed projects. Section 85 dealt with the Krishna board and Section 86 with the Godavari board in parallel terms, each board a body with a chairperson, members drawn from the Centre and the two States, and an engineering establishment. The Act’s scheme connects to the general law of inter-state rivers, set out in the article on the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act 1956, but it is deliberately not the general law: instead of leaving two co-riparian States to the disputes Act’s complaint-and-tribunal route, the reorganisation statute installed standing boards first and reserved the tribunal for the questions the boards could not settle.

Who supervises the Krishna and Godavari river boards?

The Apex Council under Section 84 supervises the two boards. It consists of the Union Minister for Water Resources as chairperson and the Chief Ministers of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana as members; it supervises their functioning, approves projects on the two rivers after appraisal by the boards and the Central Water Commission, and attempts settlement of inter-State disputes.

Some history explains why the tribunal reference mattered so much. The Krishna had already been through one full tribunal cycle: the first Krishna Water Disputes Tribunal, chaired by Justice Bachawat, reported in 1973, and its award, made binding in 1976, apportioned the river among Maharashtra, Karnataka and the undivided Andhra Pradesh on the dependable flow as then assessed. The second tribunal, chaired by Justice Brijesh Kumar and constituted in 2004 after the riparian States could not agree on the enlargement of the Almatti dam’s storage and the reassessment of the river’s yield, gave its decision in December 2010, reapportioning the river on a larger assessed flow and allotting shares to the three States, and followed it with a further report in 2013. All three States were dissatisfied in some respect, and the reports were under challenge and clarification when the division intervened, so that the Act inherited a basin whose legal allocation was mid-argument between three States and had to convert it, without reopening it, into an allocation between four interests, the two successor States inheriting the undivided State’s position between them. The Godavari presented the mirror image: its tribunal, also chaired by Justice Bachawat, had reported in 1980, and the basin’s utilisation turned on agreements among the riparian States and on sub-basin understandings that predated the division, with the Polavaram project, authorised in principle under those arrangements, standing across the new border as its largest unfinished work. Section 89’s conservation of the Krishna proceedings, and Section 84’s appraisal regime for everything new on both rivers, were drafted against this double inheritance, one river over-adjudicated and the other under-adjudicated, and the boards were expected to hold the line between them.

The tribunal provision, Section 89, was an act of institutional conservation. A Krishna Water Disputes Tribunal, the second tribunal on that river, chaired by Justice Brijesh Kumar, had given its decision in 2010 and its further report was awaited when the undivided State was split, and the division threatened to strand the proceedings, since the tribunal’s allocations ran to the undivided State. Section 89 extended the tribunal’s term with two specified references: it was to make project-wise specific allocations, if such allocations had not been made by a tribunal under the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act 1956, and to determine an operational protocol for project-wise release of water in the event of deficit flows, with an Explanation making project-specific awards already given binding on the successor States. The provision kept alive the only forum capable of converting a basin award into project-wise entitlements between the new States, and the long career of that reference since 2014 is part of the larger story told in the study of why water dispute tribunals take decades. Section 90, by contrast, removed one project from the ordinary regime altogether. The Polavaram Irrigation Project on the Godavari was declared a national project, the Act declared it expedient in the public interest that the Union should take under its control the regulation and development of the project, the consent of the successor State of Telangana was deemed to have been given, and the Central Government was charged with executing the project and obtaining all requisite clearances, including environmental and forest clearances and the norms of rehabilitation and resettlement. Within weeks of the appointed day an ordinance, later replaced by an amending Act, transferred seven mandals of Khammam district from Telangana to the residuary State, so that the area to be submerged by the project and the project itself lay within a single State’s territory. Section 91 preserved continuity on the Tungabhadra, substituting the two successor States for the undivided State on the Tungabhadra Board.

The boards’ record illustrates the gap between constituting an institution and empowering it. The boards were constituted, the Apex Council met, its second meeting taking place on 6 October 2020 under the Union Minister’s chairmanship with both Chief Ministers, and at that meeting both States were directed to submit detailed project reports of new projects to the boards for appraisal, a direction the Union repeated in Parliament in February 2021 when it told the Lok Sabha that taking up new projects on the two rivers without appraisal by the boards and sanction of the Apex Council violated Sections 84 and 85 and the Eleventh Schedule. Yet the boards functioned for years without a Gazette notification settling the full extent of their jurisdiction over the listed projects, a notification that came only in 2021, and the States in the meantime accused each other, in complaints to the Centre recorded by the Ministry of Jal Shakti itself, of building projects on both rivers without the appraisals the Act required. The institutional legacy of Part X is therefore double. It is the most complete water machinery any Indian reorganisation statute has created, and its first decade demonstrated that machinery of this kind operates at the speed of the notifications, budgets and political will supplied to it, not at the speed of its own text.

The boards were designed with a deliberate modesty that is worth noticing. They were not given the water to distribute in the first instance; the awards of the tribunals governed the entitlements, and the boards’ jurisdiction ran to the regulation and administration of the listed projects, the operation of headworks and the appraisal of new ones, with the Apex Council above them as the political forum and Section 89’s extended tribunal reference as the judicial one. Even that modest mandate collided with the two States’ determination to build. Telangana’s programme of lift irrigation on both rivers and Andhra Pradesh’s programme of interlinking and new reservoirs each proceeded on the claim that its projects were within its award share, and each State complained to the Centre that the other’s projects had not been submitted to the boards for appraisal as the Act and the Eleventh Schedule required, complaints the Ministry of Jal Shakti itself placed before Parliament. The physical politics of the shared rivers produced, in the first year, a confrontation of a kind the drafters would have recognised from the Section 8 debate: in June 2015 the two States’ police faced each other at the Nagarjuna Sagar dam over the operation of its sluices and the release of water to the right canal, and the dispute was settled by negotiation and Central intervention rather than by the boards, which were then in their infancy. The boards’ jurisdiction notification of 2021, bringing the listed projects formally within their operational remit, was the point at which the machinery of Part X acquired the legal completeness its text had promised seven years earlier, and the interval between the promise and the notification is the single clearest measure in this Act of the distance between constituting an institution and constituting it effectively.

The Union’s obligations inside the Act

Before the assurance outside the Act can be weighed, the obligations inside it need to be stated exactly, because they are more substantial than the political argument usually allows, and because their texture, hard duties mixed with soft ones, is itself instructive. Section 46 dealt with the division’s fiscal foundations: it required a reference to the Fourteenth Finance Commission, then at work, to take into account the resources available to the successor States and make separate awards for each, and it provided for a development package for the backward areas of the successor State of Andhra Pradesh, with incentives in particular for the Rayalaseema and north coastal regions, the two regions whose backwardness every document in the process acknowledged. Section 92 bound the successor States to implement the principles and guidelines of the Central Government on coal, oil and natural gas, and on the generation, transmission and distribution of power, as enumerated in the Twelfth Schedule, which among other things allotted the power of central generating stations by the ratio of actual consumption of the distribution companies over the preceding five years and gave a deficit State the first right of refusal over the other’s surplus power for ten years.

Section 93 is the provision on which the development promises hang. It provides that the Central Government shall take all necessary measures as enumerated in the Thirteenth Schedule for the progress and sustainable development of the successor States within a period of ten years from the appointed day. The Thirteenth Schedule’s education list promised the successor State of Andhra Pradesh institutions of national importance in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Plan periods, naming one Indian Institute of Technology, one National Institute of Technology, one Indian Institute of Management, one Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, one Central University, one Petroleum University, one Agricultural University and one Indian Institute of Information Technology, together with an AIIMS-type super-speciality hospital and teaching institution, a tribal university in each successor State, a horticulture university in Telangana, and the National Institute of Disaster Management in Andhra Pradesh. Its infrastructure list promised a new major port at Duggirajupatnam in the successor State, to be completed in phases with the first phase by the end of 2018, a feasibility examination by the Steel Authority of India, within six months of the appointed day, of an integrated steel plant in Khammam district of Telangana, and further items on railways, highways, an airport and industrial corridors of the same enumerated kind. Section 94 added the fiscal measures: appropriate fiscal measures including the offer of tax incentives to promote industrialisation and economic growth in both States, support for programmes for the development of backward areas including the expansion of physical and social infrastructure, the special financial support for the new capital’s essential facilities already described, and the forest land facility. Section 95 preserved educational equity across the division, providing that the existing admission quotas in government and private, aided and unaided institutions of higher, technical and medical education, as provided under Article 371D, would continue for a period of ten years under the existing common admission process, so that a student in either State kept access to the institutions of the undivided State’s system for a decade after the system itself was divided.

Measured against delivery, the Thirteenth Schedule divides into three classes. The educational institutions were, in substance, delivered. The Indian Institute of Technology at Tirupati and the Indian Institute of Management at Visakhapatnam admitted their first students in 2015, the National Institute of Technology in the successor State and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research at Tirupati began in the same first flush, the Indian Institute of Petroleum and Energy at Visakhapatnam followed in 2016 and was given statutory form the next year, the AIIMS-type institution at Mangalagiri took its first medical students in 2018, and the Central University and the Central Tribal University for Andhra Pradesh were created by amendments to the Central Universities law in 2019, at Anantapur and in Vizianagaram district respectively, with Telangana’s tribal university, at Mulugu, approved by the Union a decade after the Schedule promised one to each State. Several of these institutions worked for years from temporary campuses, the agricultural university’s delivery was tangled with the division of the undivided State’s existing agricultural and horticultural universities, and the National Institute of Disaster Management’s presence in the State took the form of a southern campus rather than a relocation, so the delivery was real and untidy in the proportions anyone familiar with the building of public institutions would expect. The fiscal provisions also acquired content outside the Act, in the manner Section 94 contemplated. The investment incentives for industry in the backward districts were given effect through the Income-tax Act, by an investment allowance for new plant and machinery installed in notified backward areas, a mechanism the Finance Act of 2015 extended to the notified districts of the successor States, and through accelerated depreciation for undertakings in those areas, so that the tax incentive promise existed in law, though in a form a taxpayer had to claim rather than a status the State could display. The special development package for the seven districts, four in Rayalaseema and three on the north coast, was released in tranches against projects the State proposed, and its absorption became one of the standing items of the implementation correspondence, the Union reporting releases and the State reporting dues. These are the ordinary instruments of Indian fiscal administration, and their ordinariness is the point the residuary State’s argument fastens on: everything in the enacted ledger was delivered, insofar as it was delivered, through instruments that required the State to ask, propose, claim and wait, whereas the status that was not enacted would have reversed the direction of the asking.

The port at Duggirajupatnam was not built: the first phase deadline of the end of 2018 passed, Union ministers informed Parliament that the site presented viability difficulties, including its proximity to the space launch facility at Sriharikota, and the successor State pursued a port at Ramayapatnam under its own auspices instead, so that a commitment written with a date in a Schedule of the Act lapsed by the efflux of the very timetable it carried. The Khammam steel plant remained at the stage the Schedule had actually prescribed, an examination of feasibility, which is a reminder that the Schedule’s verbs matter: some items say establish, some say take steps, and one prominent item said only examine. This is the enacted ledger, and any journalist or researcher assembling the primary record of these commitments, the debates, the schedules, the white papers and the counter-claims, faces the practical problem of keeping a contested documentary trail intact and private; it is the sort of file for which keeping source material and research notes protected in a single encrypted workspace exists.

The money: what the fiscal settlement actually contained

Between the obligations in the Act and the assurance outside it sits the fiscal settlement as a whole, and it repays assembly in one place, because the special category argument is usually conducted as if the status were the only money in the story. It was not. The residuary State began its existence with the Fourteenth Finance Commission’s award, which raised the States’ share in the divisible pool of central taxes to forty-two per cent for all States and recommended a revenue deficit grant for Andhra Pradesh across the award period, the Commission having assessed the State’s post-devolution gap on its own costing rather than on the State’s. The State’s own claim of its first-year resource gap, for 2014-15, was larger than the figure the Union accepted, and the Prime Minister’s undertaking that the first-year gap would be compensated became an argument about arithmetic conducted through the Finance Ministry, the Comptroller and Auditor General’s figures and NITI Aayog’s report of 1 December 2015, in which the Vice Chairman, Arvind Panagariya, mapped the developmental support due to the successor State under the Act. Section 46’s development package for the backward districts was funded in tranches for the seven districts of Rayalaseema and the north coast. The tax incentives of Section 94 were given content through notifications under the income tax law for specified districts and through the industrial policies of the two States. The capital received Central assistance under Section 94(3), in amounts the State compared unfavourably with the cost of the facilities listed in that very sub-section. And in September 2016 the whole arrangement was overlaid by the special package, under which the Union undertook, among other things, to fund the irrigation component of Polavaram in full from 2014-15 and to support the State’s externally aided projects and its capital through special assistance measures, a package whose components the Union thereafter reported against, item by item, whenever the status demand was raised in Parliament.

The Fourteenth Finance Commission’s treatment of the successor State illustrates the settlement’s character precisely. The Commission, to which Section 46 had referred the question, assessed Andhra Pradesh’s post-devolution revenue gap over its award period from 2015 to 2020 and recommended a revenue deficit grant of Rs. 22,113 crore, the largest such grant it made to any State, together with the State’s share of the enhanced forty-two per cent devolution and specific grants for local bodies and disaster management. The successor State’s complaint was not that the Commission ignored it, it plainly did not, but that the Commission’s costing of the gap was its own and not the State’s, that the first-year gap in particular, for the ten months of 2014-15 after the appointed day, was larger in the State’s accounts than in the figures the Union accepted, and that a status-based entitlement would have delivered the money as a matter of course rather than as the outcome of a costing the State could not control. The Fifteenth Finance Commission, whose period began in 2020, continued revenue deficit grants to the State on its own assessment, and the argument renewed itself in the new framework unchanged in structure: entitlement claimed, assessment offered. It is the fiscal version of the whole reorganisation’s pattern, in which everything the residuary State was promised in the language of commitment arrived, if it arrived, in the language of procedure.

The honest summary of the fiscal settlement is that a great deal of money moved under it, under at least five distinct instruments, and that the political argument was never really about whether money moved. It was about the difference between money given by right under a status, with a favourable grant-loan composition and a recognised place in the queue, and money given as a succession of discretionary packages, each announced, negotiated and reported separately, each dependent on the goodwill of the government of the day. Special category status, for the State that demanded it, was the difference between an entitlement and a relationship. That is why the equivalence argument, that the 2016 package matched the status rupee for rupee, never settled the question even where its arithmetic was accepted: what the status conferred was not only a sum but a standing, and standing is the one component no package can itemise.

The assurance outside the Act: special category status

Every element of the reorganisation described so far can be found in the statute by section number. The element that has dominated the politics of the residuary State for a decade cannot. Special category status is a classification in the machinery of Indian fiscal federalism, not a creature of any statute: it was devised in 1969 in the era of the National Development Council and the Gadgil formula for distributing Central assistance, and it was conferred by executive decision on States marked by hilly and difficult terrain, low population density or a large tribal population, a strategic border location, economic and infrastructural backwardness and non-viable State finances. Its practical content was preferential Central assistance, in its classic form plan assistance on a ninety to ten grant to loan ratio against thirty to seventy for general category States, together with concessions and incentives attached to the status. Because the status lives in executive practice, it cannot, strictly, be granted or withheld by an Act of Parliament at all; it is given by the Union executive acting through the planning machinery. What Parliament could have done, and what was urged in the debate, was to write a direction or an entitlement into the Bill. What happened instead is a matter of the Rajya Sabha’s record.

On 20 February 2014, replying to the debate on the Bill, the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, made a statement of six connected announcements, which the Prime Minister’s Office published the same day. The first was the status: for purposes of Central assistance, special category status would be extended to the successor State of Andhra Pradesh, comprising thirteen districts including the four districts of Rayalaseema and the three districts of north coastal Andhra, for a period of five years, which, the Prime Minister said, would put the State’s finances on a firmer footing. The second pointed to the Bill’s own fiscal measures clause, the future Section 94, and promised tax incentives along the lines extended to some other States. The third pointed to the special development package for the backward regions, on the lines of the Koraput-Bolangir-Kalahandi special plan in Odisha and the Bundelkhand package. The fourth reassured the House on Polavaram, that the Union Government would execute the project and that amendments needed for rehabilitation and resettlement would be given effect. A further announcement addressed the appointed day and the resource gap of the residuary State in its first year, 2014-15, which the Union undertook to compensate, a commitment the Finance Ministry’s later summary of the reorganisation commitments recorded among the four documents from which the Centre’s obligations flowed, the others being the Act itself, the report of the Fourteenth Finance Commission, and the report of the Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog dated 1 December 2015 on developmental support to the successor State. The Leader of the Opposition’s party, whose votes the government needed, welcomed the announcements; M. Venkaiah Naidu, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s most senior leader from the State, had pressed for the assurance in the debate and treated it as secured.

The distance between that evening and a legal entitlement is the whole of the subsequent story. The statement was not an amendment: no clause was added to the Bill conferring the status or directing the executive to confer it, and the Act as assented contains the words special category status nowhere. The commitments that surround it in the statement are, by contrast, traceable into the text, Section 94 for tax incentives, Section 46 for the development package and the Finance Commission reference, Section 90 for Polavaram, because those were already in the Bill the Prime Minister was commending. The status was the one element that existed only in the speech. Its career afterwards ran through institutions that each disclaimed the power to honour it. The Fourteenth Finance Commission, whose report was submitted in December 2014 and whose award period ran from 2015, redesigned tax devolution without retaining the special and general category distinction as a driver of transfers, increasing the States’ share of the divisible pool and addressing need through revenue deficit grants instead, and the Union Government adopted the position, stated by ministers in Parliament over the following years, that after the Fourteenth Finance Commission the question of granting special category status to any State did not arise in the old terms. In September 2016 the Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley, announced a special package for Andhra Pradesh which the Union described as providing monetary benefits equivalent to what the status would have brought, including full funding of the Polavaram project’s irrigation component and support for the capital and for externally aided projects, while stopping short of the status itself. The State’s politics did not accept the equivalence: in March 2018 the Telugu Desam Party withdrew from the Union’s governing alliance over the refusal of the status, its ministers resigned, and the demand remained at the centre of the successor State’s politics through changes of government in the State, each successive administration renewing it and each Union administration declining it in the same terms.

Two further features of the statement’s history complete the centrepiece. The first is that the omission from the Bill was noticed at the time and was the subject of a deliberate choice. Members of the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose support the government required in the Rajya Sabha, pressed in the debate for the commitments to the residuary State to be strengthened, and amendments directed at the Bill’s financial provisions were moved and rejected by voice vote, while the party’s senior leadership accepted the Prime Minister’s statement as the settlement. The statement was, that is, not an improvisation that escaped drafting; it was the form the settlement took after the form of statutory amendment had been considered in the chamber and not adopted, and both the government that gave it and the opposition that accepted it understood the difference, whatever their supporters later made of it. The second feature is the status’s own content, which is routinely overstated in the argument. In its classic form under the Gadgil framework, special category status governed the distribution of normal Central assistance as grants and loans in a ninety to ten ratio for the special category States against thirty to seventy for others, and carried associated concessions. It was a rule of the planning system, and by 2014 the planning system itself was within months of abolition: the Planning Commission was replaced by NITI Aayog at the beginning of 2015, plan assistance of the old kind disappeared with the distinction between plan and non-plan expenditure, and the Fourteenth Finance Commission’s devolution settlement became the operative framework for every State. The assurance of February 2014 therefore promised, for five years, a benefit whose machinery was dismantled within the first of those years, which does not make the promise worthless, the Union could have constructed an equivalent within the new framework and in 2016 said it had, but it does mean that the argument about the status has always also been an argument about a vanished fiscal world, conducted by both sides as if the category still sat in a drawer in the Finance Ministry waiting to be taken out.

Why can special category status not be enforced under this Act?

Because the status is not in the Act. It was announced by the Prime Minister on the floor of the Rajya Sabha on 20 February 2014 and never incorporated into the Bill. It is in any event an executive classification within the system of Central assistance, not a statutory entitlement a court can extract from a reorganisation Act.

Within the State, the demand organised politics across party lines in a way few fiscal questions do. The Legislative Assembly of the successor State adopted resolutions urging the Union to confer the status, governments of different parties in Amaravati renewed the demand in the same words, and the State’s parliamentary contingent made it the condition of alliances and the ground of their rupture, most sharply in 2018. The persistence has a rational core that should be acknowledged even by those who reject the demand’s legal basis: the residuary State’s revenue loss from the division was structural and permanent, since the undivided State’s own revenues had been disproportionately generated in and around the capital it lost, while the instruments offered in place of the status were temporary, tranched and renegotiable. A State in that position does not experience the difference between a status and a package as a technicality, and the demand’s longevity is the measure of the structural fact rather than of any party’s opportunism, though every party has used it.

The legal consequence deserves plain statement, because it is the article’s centrepiece claim and the series’ recurring distinction in its sharpest form. A provision can be enforced: an institution named in the Thirteenth Schedule either rises or the Union is in breach of Section 93, and the breach can be pleaded. An assurance in debate cannot be enforced in the same way: it creates a political obligation of the first rank, whose breach carries political costs, as the events of 2018 demonstrated, but it gives no court a text to apply and no applicant a right to plead. Petitioners who carried the status question into court, including by public interest litigation in the State’s High Court seeking directions for its grant, met the Union’s answer that the matter rested in executive policy and in the Finance Commission’s framework, and no court directed the conferment of the status. The grievance is therefore not, at bottom, about interpretation. Nobody needs a lawyer to find special category status in the Act; it is not there to be found. The argument is about what a Prime Minister’s word on the floor of the House is worth when the statute book is silent, and that is a question about the conventions of parliamentary government, which is precisely why it cannot be closed by litigation and has not been closed by time.

Three readings of one reorganisation

The same record supports three accounts, and the stance this article takes is that each is intelligible in its own terms and none is complete without the statute. The residuary State’s account, set out most fully in the white paper its government issued in 2018 after four and a half years of implementation, is an account of loss and non-performance. The State lost the established capital and the revenue concentration that went with Hyderabad; of fourteen assurances it counted in the main sections of the Act, it recorded none as fully implemented, five as partly implemented, among them the special development package, Polavaram, the educational institutions, tax incentives and capital support, and nine as not implemented, among them the apportionment of the Schedule IX companies, the bifurcation of the Schedule X institutions, the division of the State’s properties in New Delhi and the enhancement of assembly seats; and over the whole account stands the status assurance, given, in its telling, to secure the Bill’s passage and then withheld. Telangana’s account begins sixty years earlier: the region entered the undivided State in 1956 on safeguards that were not kept, its share of water, funds and employment was the substance of two generations of agitation, and the reorganisation was the correction of that record rather than an act of taking. On the transitional provisions its position was that Section 8 derogated from a State’s authority over its own capital, that the common capital decade obliged it to host the government of the very State from which it had separated, and that apportionment which divided assets by a population ratio while the assets and institutions sat in its territory was slower and less generous than the Act promised, a position its governments pressed in the disputes over the river boards’ jurisdiction and the division of institutions.

The Union’s account is the account of the four documents: the Act, the Prime Minister’s statement, the Fourteenth Finance Commission’s report and the NITI Aayog report of December 2015, read together as a closed set of commitments, of which those in the Act have been implemented according to their terms, those in the statement were overtaken in part by the Finance Commission’s redesign of Centre-State transfers, and the whole was rounded out by the special package of 2016, which the Union maintains delivered the substance of the status without the label. On this reading, an assurance in debate is a statement of governmental intent whose fulfilment is judged politically and in Parliament, and the proposition that it could be converted into a legal entitlement by the intensity with which it is remembered is one no Union government of any party has accepted. A reader who holds the three accounts against the text will find that each is strongest where it stays closest to the sections: the residuary State’s implementation ledger is a checkable document, Telangana’s objection to Section 8 is the objection its text invites, and the Union’s distinction between provision and assurance is, as a matter of law, simply correct, which is not the same as saying it is politically sufficient. The reorganisation also left a structural lesson that belongs to no side. Every earlier division in the Republic’s history had separated States that could each take a capital with them; this one required two States to share a capital, and the strains of the experiment, a Governor’s judgment suspended over a State’s police, two chief ministers in one secretariat complex, a decade-long countdown written into a section, came from that single design decision, which is why the settlement of 2019 in the north, considered in the article on the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act 2019, was drafted by people who had this Act open on the table and chose a different instrument altogether.

The litigation the Act generated

A contested reorganisation litigates, and this one’s litigation followed the Act’s three pressure points. The first was the Governor’s powers in the common capital. The June 2015 confrontation over Section 8, the cash-for-vote arrests, the allegation of telephone tapping, the Andhra Pradesh Cabinet’s resolution asking that the Governor manage law and order in Hyderabad as the Act provided, was conducted through cabinets, letters and legal advice rather than through a court, and it produced no judgment; the proposition in dispute, whether Section 8 displaced the State government’s ordinary control of the capital’s policing and whether ordinary legislation could do such a thing at all, the objection Arun Jaitley had framed in the debate, remains a proposition that events mooted before any court decided it. The second pressure point was apportionment. The division of institutions generated litigation of which the Supreme Court’s decision in the Andhra Pradesh State Council of Higher Education case is the type specimen: the undivided State’s higher education council, a scheduled institution, had been adapted into separate councils for the two States, and the division of its assets, deposits and posts between them, in the population ratio, reached the Supreme Court in Andhra Pradesh State Council of Higher Education v. Union of India, where the Court addressed the apportionment of a shared institution’s resources between the successor States on the Act’s own principles. Around such set pieces ran a long tail of individual service litigation, writ petitions by employees in the common High Court and, after 2019, in the two separate High Courts, turning on the Kamalanathan framework’s application to single careers: whether an allocation expressed to be tentative bound the employee, whether an option extracted in 2016 could be withdrawn in 2017, whether seniority and local candidature had been applied as the published guidelines promised. Cases of that kind were still being decided in 2020, six years after the appointed day, on facts as individual as a single deputy superintendent of police’s posting.

A fourth stream of cases ran through the educational settlement. Section 95 had preserved the common admission process and the Article 371D quotas for ten years, but the division of the State set two governments to defining local candidature for the same pool of institutions, and the questions that followed, which students counted as local to which State for admission to professional colleges, what became of the children of employees allocated across the border, and how the fee reimbursement burdens of the undivided State’s schemes were to be shared, produced orders, counter-orders and litigation in both High Courts. The fee reimbursement question in particular, the undivided State having run a large scheme of paying the fees of students from poor households in private professional colleges, generated a dispute over arrears between the two States that was settled politically in instalments rather than legally at all, and it belongs in this catalogue because it shows the Act’s scheme working as designed: Section 95 fixed the framework for a decade and left the money to be fought over inside it.

The third pressure point was Polavaram. The project’s declaration as a national project and the deeming of Telangana’s consent did not end the older litigation about the project itself: the suits by Odisha and Chhattisgarh, the upstream States whose territory the reservoir would submerge, brought under the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction, continued alongside the project’s execution, and disputes over the project’s height, its rehabilitation obligations and its cost-sharing between the Union and the successor State ran in parallel through administrative and political channels. Described as a class, the litigation confirms the Act’s design. The courts were used heavily for the apportionment and service questions the Act had built forums and principles for, and hardly at all for the two questions that dominated the politics, the Governor’s dormant power and the Prime Minister’s unanswered assurance, because those were the questions the statute had either left in suspense or left out.

What the Act did not provide

The brief for this article directs attention to the negative space of the statute, and the inventory is worth making in one place, because the grievances of the following decade attach to the absences as much as to the provisions. The Act did not name, locate or fund a capital city for the residuary State: it fixed the sharing of the old one, commissioned a study of the new one and promised support for its essential facilities, and the choice itself, the most consequential single decision of the successor State’s first decade, was left entirely to that State. The Act did not confer special category status, could not have conferred it by its own force since the status is an executive classification, and did not direct the executive to confer it. It did not enhance the residuary State’s assembly seats, which the constitutional freeze placed beyond it. It did not make Hyderabad a Union territory, a solution urged in the debate, among others by the Union minister K. Chiranjeevi, who proposed that the city be held by the Union for at least ten years, and rejected in the drafting because it would have denied Telangana its capital outright. It did not set a terminal date for the apportionment of the Ninth Schedule companies and Tenth Schedule institutions, or attach a consequence to the date’s passing, and the apportionment accordingly had no date to miss. It did not guarantee the residuary State a share of Hyderabad’s revenues beyond the division of the undivided State’s accounts, the point on which the State’s fiscal case ultimately rests: the city that generated a disproportionate share of the undivided State’s own revenues lay, in its entirety, on the far side of the border the Act drew, and no section compensated the residuary State for the geography of that fact beyond the transitional arrangements and the development promises. And it did not create any forum, other than the political one, in which the fulfilment of the promises made outside its text could be demanded. Each absence was a decision, taken by drafters who knew the alternative existed, and the honest criticism of the Act is not that the decisions were taken but that several of them were taken without the chamber’s attention being drawn to their full weight, in a passage measured in days.

The successor States in operation

The settlement’s later life can be traced through the dates on which its transitional devices fell away, each of which was written into the Act in 2014 and each of which arrived on schedule, which is more than can be said for the devices of many settlements. The common High Court divided on 1 January 2019. The common Governorship ended the same year, when separate Governors took office in Amaravati and Hyderabad and Section 7’s arrangement, having lasted five years of the period the President had determined, closed. The ten-year protections ran their course together: Section 95’s continuation of the Article 371D admission quotas and the common admission process expired with the common capital period at the beginning of June 2024, so that the students of the two States entered their professional colleges in the admission cycle that followed under separate State systems for the first time; Section 93’s ten-year window for the Thirteenth Schedule measures closed on the same horizon; and the Twelfth Schedule’s ten-year first right of refusal in power purchases ran to the same term. The appointed day had set a decade as the unit of transition, and the decade, in provision after provision, was honoured as a matter of legal form, whatever was left unfinished inside it.

The capital question took a further turn with the change of government in the successor State in 2024, when the administration of N. Chandrababu Naidu, returned to office in alliance with the parties governing at the Centre, resumed the Amaravati project as the State’s single capital and the Union responded in the currency the Act had contemplated: in the Union Budget presented in July 2024 the Finance Minister announced that the Union would facilitate special financial support for the development of the State’s capital, of the order of Rs. 15,000 crore in that financial year through multilateral development agencies, expressly in recognition of the State’s need for a capital. The announcement closed a circle that Section 94(3) had opened a decade earlier, and it did so, characteristically, by announcement rather than by amendment, leaving the statute exactly where it had always been and the settlement to be completed, as so much of it has been, in the space between the text and the word.

Other unfinished business lay outside the Act’s own timetable because the Act had left it to agreement. The apportionment of the Ninth Schedule companies and Tenth Schedule institutions continued in committee rooms and correspondence long after the white paper of 2018 had catalogued it, with the Central Government, in its Section 66 role and as the majority’s referee, periodically convening the two States; the division of the State’s establishment in New Delhi followed the same path. The residuary State redrew its own internal map in 2022, reorganising its thirteen districts into twenty-six for administrative convenience, a power the Act left untouched and a reminder that reorganisation, once legitimated as an instrument, tends to be reused by its products. The successor State of Andhra Pradesh also returned to the capital question with each change of government, the pattern described in the common capital section above, and the Supreme Court’s consideration of the Amaravati appeals proceeded alongside. None of this later history amends the Act’s text, but all of it is the Act’s consequence, and a pillar article’s duty is to record the settlement whole: a division executed in a day, a transition executed in a decade, and an argument about a sentence spoken in an evening that neither the day nor the decade has finished.

Promised, provided, delivered

The table below is the article’s argument in one view. It takes each commitment associated with the reorganisation and records whether it appears in the Act, the provision if it does, what the commitment required, and its status on the record. The row in which the answer to the first question is no is the row around which the politics of two States has turned for a decade.

Commitment	In the Act?	Provision	What it required	Status
Common capital at Hyderabad	Yes	Section 5	Hyderabad to be common capital for a period not exceeding ten years, then the capital of Telangana alone	Performed and expired at the beginning of June 2024
New capital for Andhra Pradesh	Yes	Sections 6 and 94	Expert committee on alternatives; special financial support for essential facilities in the new capital	Committee reported in August 2014; capital at Amaravati chosen, interrupted, litigated, and carried to the Supreme Court
Governor’s special responsibility	Yes	Section 8	Governor to hold special responsibility for security of life, liberty and property in the common capital area, acting in individual judgment	Never formally invoked; contested in 2015; lapsed with the common capital period
River management boards	Yes	Sections 84 to 91 and the Eleventh Schedule	Apex Council and two boards to supervise the Godavari and Krishna and appraise new projects	Boards constituted; jurisdiction notification completed only in 2021; appraisal regime disputed by both States
Polavaram as national project	Yes	Section 90	The Union to execute the project and obtain all clearances, Telangana’s consent deemed given	In execution by the Union through the State agency; cost and rehabilitation questions continuing
Institutions of national importance	Yes	Section 93 and the Thirteenth Schedule	Named institutes, universities and an AIIMS-type institution to be established, principally in Andhra Pradesh	Substantially delivered within the ten-year window, several from temporary campuses
Financial support and the resource gap	Yes, in part	Sections 46 and 94	Finance Commission reference, development package for backward areas, tax incentives, special financial support for the capital	Delivered in forms the successor State disputes as incomplete; the first-year resource gap compensation rested on the Prime Minister’s statement
Special category status	No	None	Five years of special category status for the successor State of Andhra Pradesh, announced 20 February 2014	Never conferred; a special package announced in September 2016 as its equivalent; the demand continues

A note on method belongs at the end, for the researcher who uses this article as a map to the primary record. The statute itself is the beginning and not the end of the evidence. The Rajya Sabha’s official report of 20 February 2014, with the Prime Minister’s statement as published by his office the same day, fixes the assurance and its terms. The Fourteenth Finance Commission’s report fixes the fiscal framework that succeeded it. The NITI Aayog report of 1 December 2015 and the Finance Ministry’s summaries of the reorganisation commitments fix the Union’s own account of what it owed and under which document. The Government of Andhra Pradesh’s white paper of 2018 fixes the successor State’s account in its most documented form, and the statements of the Telangana government on Section 8 and the boards fix the third side. A reader who holds those five documents against the Act’s text can reproduce every position in this article from the sources, which is the standard a contested statute’s pillar should meet: the article’s synthesis is its own, but none of its load-bearing facts belongs to it.

Assessment

Judged as a statute, the Act did the thing reorganisation Acts exist to do. Two States were brought into being on a fixed day with legislatures, courts, services, budgets and bodies of law, without an administrative vacuum and without the division of the capital producing the breakdown its critics feared. Its institutional creations, the river boards and the Apex Council, are permanent additions to the governance of two river basins. Its educational settlement, a decade of preserved admission quotas and a schedule of new national institutions, was the most far-sighted part of the design and the part most nearly delivered whole. Its weaknesses are equally identifiable in the text. The apportionment Parts specified principles where only inventories could finish the job, and the job remained unfinished for years in the Schedule IX companies, the Schedule X institutions and the State’s properties outside its territory. The Thirteenth Schedule mixed verbs of different strengths and a deadline it did not keep, at Duggirajupatnam. The common capital device worked as a timetable and failed as a settlement, because it postponed the capital question for the residuary State without answering it, and the answer improvised after 2014 consumed the successor State’s politics for as long as the sharing itself had lasted.

The Act also reset the terms on which Indian federalism argues about State division, and that may be its longest legacy. Before 2014 the working assumption of the reorganisation debate, carried from 1956 and reinforced in 2000, was that Parliament divided States that broadly consented to be divided, or at least States whose legislatures did not formally refuse. The Andhra Pradesh legislature’s resolution of rejection, and Parliament’s lawful indifference to it, established with a clarity no text could have given that Article 3 means what it says: the views of the State are an input, not a veto, and a determined Union majority can divide a large State against the recorded will of its assembly. Every subsequent argument about the creation of new States, and every State government calculating its exposure, proceeds on that understanding. The Act likewise stands as the fullest modern specimen of the reorganisation statute as a genre, longer and more institutionally inventive than the Acts of 2000, and its inventions, the sunset shared capital, the gubernatorial special responsibility, the statutory river boards, the development schedule with a ten-year term, are the stock from which later settlements have drawn, sometimes in admiration and sometimes in avoidance. A statute can succeed as an instrument and still fail as a settlement, and the measure of this one is that a decade of argument has not produced a serious proposal to undo it from either side of the border it drew: Telangana does not seek reunion, Andhra Pradesh does not seek the Act’s annulment, and the dispute is entirely about the performance of the promises made around it, which is another way of saying that the division itself, the thing the Act actually did, has been accepted by both its products as final.

Judged as a political settlement, the Act’s centre of gravity lies outside its sections, in the ninety minutes of a Rajya Sabha evening. The series of which this article is part has repeatedly distinguished what a statute provides from what was said about it in the chamber: in the drafting history of labour codes, in the gap between a Bill as introduced and as enacted, in the promises attached to money Bills. The Andhra Pradesh reorganisation is the instance in which that distinction has carried the greatest continuing consequence, because the undertaking left outside the text was not a detail but the fiscal foundation on which the losing region was asked to accept its loss. The lesson the episode teaches is not that assurances in debate should never be given; the Bill might not have passed without this one. It is that an assurance intended to be relied on must either be written into the Bill, where it becomes enforceable and finite, or be understood by everyone in the chamber, at the moment it is given, as a pledge whose only sanction is political. In Hyderabad’s case the chamber did not have that understanding, the residuary State built a decade of budgets and elections on the other one, and the distance between the two understandings is the truest measure of what this reorganisation cost. The general guidance in this article is legal information and analysis of a public statute; it is not advice on any individual matter, and anyone with a live question under the Act, on service allocation, institutional apportionment or water entitlements, should take advice on the facts of that question, since the forums and limitation periods the Act and the general law prescribe are unforgiving.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What did the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act create and divide?

The Act created the State of Telangana out of ten districts of the undivided Andhra Pradesh and preserved the remaining thirteen districts as the residuary State of Andhra Pradesh, with effect from the appointed day, 2 June 2014. Between the two it divided the legislature’s seats, the High Court for a transitional period, the public debt and other assets and liabilities principally in the population ratio, the State public sector undertakings listed in the Ninth Schedule, the institutions listed in the Tenth Schedule, the State service employees, and the administration of the Krishna and Godavari rivers, for which it created two management boards under an Apex Council.

Q: What was the arrangement for the common capital?

Section 5 made Hyderabad, defined as the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation area, the common capital of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh for a period not exceeding ten years from the appointed day. During that period both governments functioned from the city, the Governor of the undivided State served as common Governor, and Section 8 gave him a special responsibility for the security of residents of the common capital area. On the expiry of the period at the beginning of June 2024 Hyderabad became the capital of Telangana alone, and the residuary State was left to the new capital that Section 5 contemplated and Sections 6 and 94 supported.

Q: Was special category status part of the Act?

No. The words special category status appear nowhere in the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act. The status was announced by the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, in his reply to the Rajya Sabha debate on 20 February 2014, as an assurance that it would be extended to the successor State of Andhra Pradesh for five years for purposes of Central assistance. It was not moved as an amendment, not incorporated into the Bill and not voted on, and special category status is in any event an executive classification within the system of Central assistance rather than a statutory entitlement, which is why its non-conferment has been a political grievance rather than a litigable breach of the Act.

Q: How were Andhra Pradesh institutions and corporations divided?

The Act used two schedules and two principles. The Ninth Schedule listed 89 State companies and corporations whose assets and liabilities Section 68 subjected to apportionment, on the population ratio of 58.32 to 41.68 as the default, subject to agreement between the States and Central direction; immovable assets generally followed their location. The Tenth Schedule listed 107 institutions, training and research establishments and similar bodies, for which Section 75 preserved the continuance of facilities to the people of both States for a transitional period before the institutions themselves were bifurcated. In practice both apportionments ran for years, with the Schedule IX companies and Schedule X institutions among the items the residuary State recorded as unimplemented in its 2018 white paper.

Q: What did the Andhra Pradesh Act provide about river water management?

Part X of the Act, Sections 84 to 91, built a standing institutional layer over the two shared rivers. Section 84 required an Apex Council, chaired by the Union Minister for Water Resources with the two Chief Ministers as members, to supervise a Godavari River Management Board and a Krishna River Management Board, which were given jurisdiction over the projects listed in the Eleventh Schedule and functions including the regulation of releases in accordance with tribunal awards and the appraisal of new projects. Section 89 extended the term of the Krishna Water Disputes Tribunal to make project-wise allocations and settle a protocol for deficit years, Section 90 declared the Polavaram project a national project to be executed by the Union, and Section 91 continued the Tungabhadra Board with both States represented.

Q: How was the Andhra Pradesh bifurcation Bill passed in Parliament?

The Bill was referred to the Andhra Pradesh legislature for its views under Article 3, and the Legislative Assembly rejected it by resolution on 30 January 2014, a rejection that did not bind Parliament. Introduced in the Lok Sabha on 13 February 2014 amid disorder in which a member discharged pepper spray in the chamber and sixteen members were suspended, it was passed there on 18 February 2014 by voice vote while the live telecast stood interrupted, in circumstances that drew significant contemporaneous objection. The Rajya Sabha debated and passed it on 20 February 2014 after the Prime Minister’s statement of assurances, and the President assented on 1 March 2014.

Q: What obligations did the Andhra Pradesh Act place on the Union?

The Act bound the Union to constitute the expert committee on the new capital under Section 6, to refer the successor States’ resources to the Fourteenth Finance Commission and provide a development package for backward areas under Section 46, to execute the Polavaram project as a national project under Section 90, to take the measures enumerated in the Thirteenth Schedule for the development of the successor States under Section 93, including named institutions of national importance in Andhra Pradesh, and under Section 94 to take fiscal measures including tax incentives, support backward area programmes, and provide special financial support for the essential facilities of the new capital.

Q: Which Andhra Pradesh reorganisation promises remain contested?

The residuary State’s stocktaking counts the apportionment of the Ninth Schedule companies, the bifurcation of the Tenth Schedule institutions, the division of the State’s properties in New Delhi, the full delivery of the development package and capital support, and the enhancement of assembly seats among the commitments unimplemented or incomplete, while the Union maintains that its statutory obligations have been discharged according to their terms and points to the institutions established and the special package of 2016. Over all of them stands special category status, the promise that was never in the Act, whose conferment Andhra Pradesh continues to demand and the Union continues to decline on the ground that the Fourteenth Finance Commission’s framework displaced the category.

Q: What is the population ratio in the Act, and where does it do its work?

Section 2(h) defines the population ratio of the two successor States as 58.32 to 41.68, being their shares of the undivided State’s population in the 2011 Census, the larger share belonging to the residuary Andhra Pradesh. The ratio is the Act’s default rule of division. It governs the apportionment of assets and liabilities that are not fixed in one territory, the public debt adjustments, the allocation of the expenditure on the common High Court’s judges, the division of State-level posts between the two services, and the starting point for dividing the companies and corporations of the Ninth Schedule, in each case subject to the Act’s exceptions for assets and institutions that follow their location.

Q: What else did the Prime Minister announce in the Rajya Sabha on 20 February 2014?

Besides special category status for five years, the Prime Minister’s statement of 20 February 2014 made five further announcements. Tax incentives would be offered to promote industrialisation in both successor States, as Section 94 of the Bill already stipulated. A special development package would be given for the backward regions of the residuary State, in particular Rayalaseema and north coastal Andhra, on the lines of the Koraput-Bolangir-Kalahandi plan and the Bundelkhand package. The Union Government would execute the Polavaram project and give effect to any amendments needed for its rehabilitation and resettlement. The resource gap of the successor State in 2014-15 would be compensated by the Centre. A further announcement concerned the appointed day itself, confirming that the new State would come into being on the day the Act notified, 2 June 2014. Each announcement except the first corresponded to something the Bill itself, or the Finance Commission process, already contained.

Q: What is the Apex Council, and who sits on it?

The Apex Council is the body Section 84 of the Act required the Central Government to constitute for the supervision of the Godavari and Krishna River Management Boards. It consists of the Union Minister for Water Resources as chairperson and the Chief Ministers of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana as members. Its functions are to supervise the functioning of the two boards, to plan and approve proposals for new projects on the two rivers after appraisal by the boards and the Central Water Commission, to resolve disputes over the sharing of river waters amicably through negotiation between the successor States, and to refer disputes outside the Krishna tribunal’s remit to a tribunal under the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act 1956.

Q: How were State government employees divided between Andhra Pradesh and Telangana?

Part VIII of the Act, Sections 76 to 83, vested the allocation of State service employees in the Central Government, acting on the recommendations of an advisory committee constituted under Section 80 and chaired by C. R. Kamalanathan. Posts serving one State exclusively went to that State; State-level posts were divided in the population ratio, subject to a geographic intensity exception; employees recorded options, which were weighed with seniority, and the Centre retained power to allot an employee to either State in the administrative interest. All India Services officers were allocated through a separate committee. The exercise covered roughly 51,000 State services employees and produced a long tail of individual writ petitions about tentative and final allocations.

Q: What did Section 95 preserve about admission quotas under Article 371D?

Section 95 provided that, in order to ensure equal opportunities for quality higher education to all students in the successor States, the existing admission quotas in all government and private, aided and unaided institutions of higher, technical and medical education, in so far as they were provided under Article 371D of the Constitution, would continue for a period of ten years from the appointed day, during which the existing common admission process would also continue. The effect was that the division of the State did not divide its students’ access to its professional colleges for a decade: a candidate in either successor State retained the benefit of the undivided admission system until the ten-year period ran out at the beginning of June 2024.

Q: What happened to the common High Court at Hyderabad?

Section 30 of the Act continued the High Court of Judicature at Hyderabad as the common High Court for both successor States until a separate High Court was constituted for Andhra Pradesh under Article 214 of the Constitution. The judges of the undivided court became judges of the common court, and the expenditure on their salaries and allowances was allocated between the two States in the population ratio. The common arrangement ended when the Andhra Pradesh High Court was constituted separately and began functioning at Amaravati on 1 January 2019, from which date the court at Hyderabad has been the High Court for the State of Telangana alone, and litigation arising in the residuary State moved to its own court.

Q: What task did Section 89 give to the Krishna Water Disputes Tribunal?

Section 89 extended the term of the existing Krishna Water Disputes Tribunal, the second tribunal on that river, which had decided the basin’s allocation for the undivided State, and gave it two specified references between the successor States. It was to make project-wise specific allocations, if such allocations had not been made by a tribunal constituted under the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act 1956, so that the basin award could be translated into entitlements project by project. It was also to determine an operational protocol for project-wise release of water in the event of deficit flows. An Explanation to the section made the project-specific awards already given before the appointed day binding on both successor States.

Q: Which institutions of national importance did the Thirteenth Schedule promise to the successor State of Andhra Pradesh?

The education list of the Thirteenth Schedule, given effect by Section 93, provided that the Government of India would take steps to establish in the successor State of Andhra Pradesh, in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Plan periods, one Indian Institute of Technology, one National Institute of Technology, one Indian Institute of Management, one Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, one Central University, one Petroleum University, one Agricultural University and one Indian Institute of Information Technology. It further promised an AIIMS-type super-speciality hospital and teaching institution in the State, a tribal university in each successor State, a horticulture university in Telangana, and the National Institute of Disaster Management in Andhra Pradesh.

Q: How did the Union answer the special category status demand after 2014?

The Union’s answer developed in three steps. The Fourteenth Finance Commission’s report, submitted in December 2014, redesigned Centre-State transfers without retaining the special category distinction as a basis for them, and Union ministers thereafter stated in Parliament that after that report the grant of special category status did not arise. A report by the Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog dated 1 December 2015 mapped the developmental support owed to the successor State under the Act. In September 2016 the Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley, announced a special package which the Union described as equivalent in monetary terms to the status, covering full Central funding of the Polavaram irrigation component and support for the capital, while expressly not conferring the status itself, which the State’s politics has never accepted as a substitute.

Q: What did the Sivaramakrishnan Committee recommend for the new capital of Andhra Pradesh?

The expert committee constituted under Section 6 of the Act, chaired by K. C. Sivaramakrishnan, a former Union Urban Development Secretary, reported at the end of August 2014. It cautioned against building a single large greenfield capital city, drew attention to the environmental costs and land acquisition burdens of the options before it, and favoured a distributed pattern of development in which the capital region in the Vijayawada and Guntur area would carry the core governmental functions while other institutions and investment were spread across the regions of the successor State. The Government of Andhra Pradesh did not adopt the distributed model; it chose a single greenfield capital at Amaravati on the Krishna, assembled by land pooling under a State capital region law.

Q: Why did Section 8 of the Act become a dispute between the two States in 2015?

Section 8 gave the Governor special responsibility for the security of life, liberty and property in the common capital area, including law and order, to be exercised in his individual judgment after consulting the Telangana Council of Ministers. In June 2015, after the Telangana Anti-Corruption Bureau’s arrests in the cash-for-vote case and the broadcast of recordings said to involve the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, the Government of Andhra Pradesh alleged that its leaders’ telephones had been tapped and its Cabinet resolved that law and order in Hyderabad should be managed by the Governor as the Act provided. Telangana’s government rejected any activation of the section as a derogation from its authority over its own capital, and the power was never formally invoked.

Q: What did the 2014 amendment to the Act change about the Polavaram project area?

Within weeks of the appointed day, the Act was amended, first by an ordinance promulgated in May 2014 and later by an amending Act, to transfer seven mandals of Khammam district from Telangana to the residuary State of Andhra Pradesh. The transfer enlarged the exclusion that Section 3 had originally made for specified revenue villages of Khammam. Its purpose was to place the Polavaram project’s submergence area and the villages affected by it within the territory of the single State that would receive the project’s benefits and carry its rehabilitation burden, so that the national project declared by Section 90 would not straddle the new border. The mandals were merged into the East Godavari and West Godavari districts of Andhra Pradesh.