The state of 'Maharashtra with Mumbai' was established on 1st May 1960. How many districts and Talukas were there in newly created Maharashtra State.
(a) 26 Dist.
(b) 28 Dist.
(c) 239 Talukas
(d) 229

Question

The state of 'Maharashtra with Mumbai' was established on 1st May 1960.  How many districts and Talukas were there in newly created Maharashtra State.
(a) 26 Dist.
(b) 28 Dist.
(c) 239 Talukas
(d) 229 Talukas

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), which pairs statement (d) with statement (a): 229 Talukas and 26 Districts. The state that came into being on 1 May 1960 was carved out of the bilingual Bombay State under the Bombay Reorganisation Act, 1960, which split that state into Maharashtra and Gujarat and left the city of Bombay in Maharashtra — the single point on which the whole Samyukta Maharashtra agitation had turned. Maharashtra began life with 26 districts; that figure is the one carried by the standard district lists, which open by saying that the state 'was formed on 1 May 1960 with 26 initial districts', and it has grown since by ten more to the 36 of today, Palghar (2014) being the newest. The taluka figure the Commission keys alongside it is 229. Note carefully what the item is actually doing: it is not a single-fact recall question but a compound one. All four of the printed statements are plausible-looking administrative numbers, and each answer choice yokes exactly one district figure to exactly one taluka figure, so a candidate who remembers 26 districts but nothing about talukas still cannot get past two surviving choices — statement (a) appears in option (1) with 239 Talukas and in option (3) with 229 Talukas. Only knowing both halves settles it, and the printed order inside option (3) reverses the labels, giving the taluka figure first, which is a further small trap for anyone reading the option set at speed. The district count is the anchor to memorise, because it is the one that is documented everywhere and the one the exam has asked about repeatedly; the taluka count is the discriminator this particular question adds on top of it.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This choice gets the district count right and the taluka count wrong: it pairs 26 Dist. with 239 Talukas. It is the most dangerous of the three wrong choices precisely because half of it is true, and because 239 differs from the keyed 229 by a single substituted digit — the kind of near-miss an examiner plants when the real fact is a number rather than a name. A candidate who has revised only that Maharashtra started with 26 districts will find statement (a) inside this choice, feel the click of recognition and stop reading. The lesson is structural rather than factual: on a paper that yokes two figures into one answer choice, the moment you recognise one half you should treat the other half as the actual question and read every choice that contains your recognised half before committing.  (b) This choice takes the correct taluka figure, 229, but attaches it to 28 Dist., which is not the number Maharashtra began with. Twenty-eight is a superficially attractive figure because the district map of Maharashtra did keep changing after 1960 and passed through intermediate totals on its way from 26 to today's 36 — Sindhudurg and Ratnagiri, Jalna, Latur, Mumbai Suburban, Nandurbar, Washim, Hingoli, Gondia and Palghar are all later creations. But the question asks what existed in the newly created state on 1 May 1960, not what existed a decade or two afterwards, and for that moment the documented figure is 26.  (d) This is the choice on which both halves fail: 239 Talukas and 28 Dist., neither of them the figure for 1 May 1960. It exists in the option set to complete the combinatorial square — with two district figures and two taluka figures on offer, the paper is able to print all four possible pairings, so that a candidate who is guessing has no structural asymmetry to exploit and elimination by shape alone is impossible. That design is worth noticing in itself: when a matching-style option set is complete in this way, guessing buys nothing, and the only route through is the underlying fact.

Concept: Maharashtra was not created out of nothing; it was extracted from the bilingual Bombay State. The States Reorganisation Act of 1956 had redrawn most of India on linguistic lines but had deliberately left Bombay State bilingual, holding Marathi and Gujarati areas together with the commercial city of Bombay at the centre of the dispute. The Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti led the agitation for a Marathi-speaking state that included Bombay, and 105 people died in police firing in the city during it — a toll commemorated by the Hutatma Chowk memorial at Flora Fountain. The Bombay Reorganisation Act, 1960, finally split the state in two with effect from 1 May, giving Bombay to Maharashtra and creating Gujarat with its capital initially at Ahmedabad. The administrative skeleton the new state inherited is what this question tests: a state of 26 districts, grouped into revenue divisions, and subdivided into talukas — the taluka being the tahsil-level revenue unit under a tahsildar, the layer at which land records, revenue collection and much of rural administration actually sit.

State PCS 2021 Q1 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q1 — History PYQ with Answer