The union under strain: India must reckon with the crisis of centralisation
A democratic, pluralist republic is being hollowed out from the centre. The remedy is bold: devolve power, resources and governance back to the states that built this nation
India's constitutional settlement was never intended to produce a monolithic state governed by a single cultural identity. The framers of its 1950 constitution understood that a country of some thirty major languages, hundreds of dialects, and dozens of distinct civilisational traditions could only cohere through a genuine federal bargain: one in which each linguistic and cultural nationality retained meaningful self-governance, while sharing a common framework of rights, institutions and duties. That bargain is now under severe stress.
The pressures are both structural and ideological. Structurally, the central government has steadily accumulated fiscal, administrative and cultural authority at the expense of state governments—reversing the design intent of a constitution that lists far more subjects under the concurrent and state lists than under the Union list alone. Ideologically, a politics that privileges a single religious and linguistic identity increasingly shapes appointments, allocations and symbolic choices at the national level, threatening the pluralism that underwrites India's coherence as a state. Unless this drift is reversed, the republic risks fracturing along the very fault lines it was designed to bridge.
The most immediate grievance is fiscal. States are constitutionally entitled to a share of central tax revenues, distributed according to the Finance Commission's formula. In principle, this amounts to roughly 42% of the divisible pool. In practice, the Centre has found numerous means to reduce the effective transfer: increasingly preferring cesses and surcharges—which fall outside the divisible pool—over regular taxes, and periodically withholding funds owed to states in what amounts to a form of administrative coercion. The results are predictable and corrosive: state governments are unable to honour commitments to their citizens in education, health and infrastructure, and blame is distributed confusingly between levels of government.
The solution is a principled one. The share of tax revenues allocated to states should rise progressively, reaching two-thirds of the total over a realistic timetable. Distribution should reflect a composite index that accounts for revenue contributed, population, and distance from national development benchmarks—thereby rewarding both fiscal effort and residual need. Crucially, transfers should be made automatically at source, removing the discretion—and the leverage—that currently sits with the finance ministry. Delayed disbursements should attract interest penalties at the central bank's benchmark lending rate, as would any other commercial obligation.
A slow-moving constitutional crisis is approaching in the form of delimitation—the reallocation of parliamentary constituencies to reflect the 2021 census. The arithmetic of this exercise is brutally simple. States in the south and west, which invested in public health and education over the past five decades and consequently saw fertility rates fall to replacement level or below, will lose seats relative to states in the Gangetic plain that did not. The effect is to transfer political power from better-governed states to worse-governed ones, and to entrench the demographic and cultural dominance of the Hindi-speaking heartland at the expense of the country's other great nationalities.
This is not a partisan grievance. It is a structural flaw in the use of population as the sole criterion for political representation in a federation. A permanent freeze on the allocation of parliamentary constituencies—using the 1971 baseline that has served the country for half a century—should be maintained until a more equitable formula, weighted for developmental performance, can be negotiated. The integrity of the federal compact demands it.
The quality of higher education in India is, by most measures, a scandal. The country produces vast numbers of graduates; it produces far fewer people equipped for sophisticated work in medicine, law, technology or the social sciences. Part of the blame lies with the centralised regulatory apparatus—the University Grants Commission, the All India Council for Technical Education and their various satellites—which have imposed a floor on quality that has in practice become a ceiling. States that have attempted to innovate have found themselves constrained by national curricula, accreditation rules and appointment processes that serve bureaucratic convenience over educational outcomes.
Education should be made a full state subject. The national regulatory bodies should be wound down or restructured as advisory bodies, with no coercive authority over state-funded institutions. This would create genuine competition among states for educational quality—a competition that Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and others have shown themselves more than capable of engaging. The centre may retain a co-ordinating role in national examinations and a redistributive role in funding, but the design and delivery of education belongs with the governments closest to the students it serves.
The Archaeological Survey of India presents a related case. India's extraordinary patrimony of monuments, sites and art treasures is managed by a central agency whose track record of preservation has been, at best, uneven, and whose cultural priorities have visibly narrowed in recent years. The responsibility—and the resources—for this heritage should be devolved to state governments, which have both the incentive and the contextual knowledge to manage it properly. National oversight can remain; national monopoly cannot.
Two further dimensions of inequality deserve attention. India's military and paramilitary forces draw disproportionately from certain northern and north-western regions, a legacy of colonial-era "martial race" theories that no democratic state should perpetuate. The resulting concentration of government employment—and the generous lifetime pension and benefits that accompany military service—in some states over others is an economic distortion as much as a political one. A genuine national army should recruit nationally. The figures are stark: a single-class regiment drawn from Punjab's 30m people commands roughly 74 battalions, while the Madras Regiment, covering 270m people across South India, fields just 21.
Mineral wealth presents a parallel issue. The country's coal, iron ore, bauxite, copper and other extractive resources lie overwhelmingly beneath the lands of non-Gangetic states—Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh—yet the revenues from their exploitation flow largely to the centre. This is an inversion of natural justice. Exploitation rights and their associated revenues should devolve to the states in which resources are located, subject to national environmental regulation and redistribution mechanisms designed to address genuine fiscal disparities between states.
Minimum support price procurement—effectively a taxpayer-funded subsidy to agricultural producers—is concentrated in a handful of northern states, principally Punjab and Haryana. This geographic skew is economically inefficient and politically corrosive, creating the impression that the central government manages policy in the interests of a favoured constituency. MSP procurement should either be extended to all states on the basis of agricultural acreage, or compensatory grants made to those excluded—a principle that applies the same logic as horizontal fiscal equalisation in any mature federation.
The media landscape demands reform of a different kind. Radio remains the primary information channel for hundreds of millions of Indians in rural and peri-urban areas, yet news radio is still a state monopoly. There is no coherent justification for this. Private and state government television and print have operated freely for decades; the argument that radio poses a uniquely dangerous information risk belongs to a different era. FM band news licences should be opened to private and subnational government operators without delay. An informed citizenry is a precondition of democracy; the infrastructure of that information should not be a monopoly of the centre.
Environmental policy rounds out the agenda. Hydrocarbon combustion and single-use plastic packaging are measurable, tractable problems. A rationalised tariff regime on raw materials for disposable plastics, combined with tax incentives for electric and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, would begin to address both without requiring elaborate new bureaucracies. The instruments exist; what is lacking is the political will to use them.
None of this is revolutionary. Most of what is proposed here—fiscal devolution, educational autonomy, equitable military recruitment, resource revenue sharing—is standard practice in the world's functional federations. Australia, Germany, Canada and the United States have all grappled with the tension between central coherence and regional autonomy, and have generally found that the latter, properly structured, strengthens rather than threatens the former.
India's diversity is not a problem to be managed. It is the source of the country's resilience, creativity and democratic energy. A state that attempts to suppress or override that diversity in the name of an imagined national uniformity will find it has traded a functioning republic for a brittle simulacrum of one. The choice—to honour the constitutional bargain or to abandon it—grows more consequential with every passing year. The time to choose, wisely, is now.
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