25 Years of Uttarakhand: History, Reasons Behind the Statehood Movement, and How the New Statehood Is Going VS UP | Explained news

Long history of demand

Although the earliest claims for special rights to the region date back to 1815 after the East India Company annexed Kumaon, the issue gained great importance in 1938 when Jawaharlal Nehru supported it in the special session of Congress.

According to a 1999 paper by Emma Maudsley entitled “A New Himalayan State in India: Popular Perceptions of Regionalism, Politics and Development,” before independence, elite representatives of the region argued that the hills should be separated from the plains. These demands were ignored, and Kumaon and British Garhwal were merged with the new state of Uttar Pradesh in 1947, followed by Tehri Garhwal in 1949.

Over the next four decades, three chief ministers of Uttar Pradesh came from Uttaranchal (J.B. Pant, H.N. Bahuguna, and N.D. Tiwari), but all three opposed the creation of a separate hill state during their rule.

When the region’s first political outfit, the Uttarakhand Kranti Dal, was formed in July 1979, steady popular support poured in for the formation of the hill state. UKD was founded by Bipin Chandra Tripathi, Indramani Badoni, Kashi Singh Iri and Professor Devi Dat Pant, and the party ensured that the idea spread among the people of the region.

Apart from the aspirations of the hill people, another argument made in favor of creating a separate state was that Uttar Pradesh was too large to be governed effectively.

A major turning point came in 1994, which instilled urgency in the statehood movement and made the Garhwalis and Kumaunis ignore their mutual differences to unite under the Uttarakhandi identity.

This was the year when the then UP Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav decided to implement 27 per cent reservation for Other Backward Classes. The upper-caste people of the hills were alarmed, assuming that the area would be flooded with “outsiders” from the plains occupying jobs and educational institutes.

Kamla Pant, a leader of the Uttarakhand Mahila Manch who was involved in the statehood movement, recalls that the area was rent-a-like with cries of “Aarakshan ka ilaaj prithak rajya (Separate state is the cure for reservation).”

The state subsequently witnessed several marches and demonstrations to protest the demand for statehood.

In 1996, two years after the infamous Rampur Tiraha case in which police opened fire on protesters, killing seven, with allegations of sexual assault against women, then Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda announced the formation of the state of Uttarakhand, which was renamed as Uttarakhand in 2007, on Independence Day. In 1998, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led government sent the Uttar Pradesh Reorganization Bill to the UP government, after which the legislation was passed with 26 amendments proposed by the state assembly.

Reasons for claiming the state of Uttarakhand

Political representation: Political representation was a source of grave concern for the people of the hill. While the neighboring state of Himachal Pradesh has 68 Assembly constituencies, the Uttarakhand region had 22 Federal Assembly seats (at the time of formation of the state) despite having a similar population to HP. The Ramashankar Kaushik Committee, which submitted its report recommending a separate hilly state to the Mulayam Singh Yadav government in 1994, has registered this concern.

The report recommended that the city of Gairsain in Chamoli, on the border of Garhwal and Kumaon, be made the capital of the hill state. “Hill capital of the hill state: This was the logic behind the demand for Girsain as a capital,” Pant said.

When Dehradun was declared the capital, anger returned as people argued that Lucknow was closer to Kumaon than Dehradun. Moreover, Pant said, the hills were emptying at an alarming rate due to migration, and in demanding statehood, the agitators envisioned employment opportunities in the hills to stop this crisis.

“In our vision statement, we had a plan rooted in the gram sabha. A state free of crime, corruption and unemployment, and where decisions are taken in consultation with women, among other stakeholders,” she said. However, Pant adds, none of these demands were met.

Resource allocation: Another declaration behind the demand is that the resources of the hill region are being exploited by the rest of UP without proper compensation or balanced development in return. This was further complicated by the realization of the cultural and geographical distance between the “decision makers in the plains” and their lack of knowledge of the hill region, its people, and their needs.

When the state was eventually formed, the demographics included a good number of non-Paharis as well, including Udham Singh Nagar and Haridwar.

Of the total geographic area of ​​Uttarakhand of 5.35 million hectares, hills constitute 86% or 4.6 million hectares, while plains constitute 14% or 0.7 million hectares. When it comes to political representation, out of the total 13 districts, the three that fall in the plains are Dehradun, Haridwar and Udham Singh Nagar. These seats represent 30 seats out of the total 70 seats in the Assembly.

How has Uttarakhand performed compared to its parent state, Uttar Pradesh?

The per capita income of Uttarakhand in 2023-24 was Rs 2.6 lakh, while the per capita income of Uttarakhand was Rs 93,514. The GDP (constant prices) for 2023-24 (2024-25 not available for UP) of Uttarakhand was Rs 2 lakh crore, while GSDP of UP was Rs 14 lakh crore (figures as per Niti Aayog).

According to the State Level Bankers’ Committee, as of March 2025, Uttarakhand’s credit-to-deposit ratio was 44 per cent, while that of its home state UP was 54 per cent.

On human development indicators, Uttarakhand performs (slightly) better than Uttar Pradesh.

According to the National Family Health Survey 5 conducted between 2019 and 2021, the sex ratio at birth in rural areas of UP is 943 (females per 1,000 male children) and 933 in urban areas. In Uttarakhand, the sex ratio at birth in rural areas is 937 and in urban areas is 1,094.

While 91 per cent of Uttar Pradesh’s population lives with an active electricity connection, 99.6 per cent have electricity connection in the hill state. In Uttar Pradesh, only 39 percent of women and 48 percent of men have 10 or more years of education, but in Uttarakhand, this figure is 50.4 percent for women and 59.8 percent for men. Uttar Pradesh’s infant mortality rate is 50.4 per 1,000 live births, while Uttarakhand’s is 39.1.

Institutional deliveries in both the states are at the same level, with 83.4 per cent of births taking place in a health facility in Uttar Pradesh and 83.2 per cent of births in Uttarakhand. Anemia was common among women in UP, with 50 per cent suffering from the disease between the ages of 15 and 49, and 42.6 per cent of women in Uttarakhand of the same age group were anemic. As many as 34.8 per cent of women in Uttar Pradesh have been exposed to domestic violence, and in Uttarakhand, 15.1 per cent of women have been exposed to it.

In Uttarakhand, 9.67 per cent of the population was recorded as multidimensionally poor, down from 17.67 in the Fourth National Health Statistics Survey. This figure was 22.93 per cent in Uttar Pradesh, down from 37.68 per cent. However, the population of Uttarakhand as per 2011 census is 1.01 lakh crore, while that of Uttarakhand is 19.98 lakh crore, which is 16.5 per cent of India’s population.

Where Uttarakhand lags behind

The education and health sectors in Uttarakhand have remained largely underdeveloped. In terms of deprivation in school education, although Uttarakhand fared better than Uttar Pradesh with 4.65 per cent deprivation, this figure saw an increase from NFHS 4, which indicated 4.37 per cent deprivation. The percentage of population deprived of education in UP was 10.91 per cent.

There are 7,073 schools with fewer than 20 students enrolled, and 1,740 schools with only one teacher. There are currently 146 per-child schools in the state, 131 of which are government, and 1,379 government schools have an average of three students. According to the 2023-24 report of the Unified District Information System for Education, a central database, Uttarakhand is the state with the second highest number of schools with less than 20 enrollments (37.5%), after Arunachal Pradesh (39.1%). The mountainous terrain and migration can be attributed to this. In Uttar Pradesh, 5.7 per cent of schools have an enrollment of less than 20 years.

Incidentally, the division between hills and plains is also evident within the state in the health sector. The Comptroller and Auditor General’s report based on the audit between 2016 and 2021 revealed a stark difference in the availability of doctors between plains and hilly districts: in four plain districts – Dehradun, Haridwar, Nainital and Udham Singh Nagar – there was a 50 per cent shortage of specialist doctors for sanctioned posts, while in nine hilly districts the shortage reached 70 per cent.

In addition, the hill state suffers from frequent disasters and extreme weather events. Since April 2025, multiple episodes of floods in Thārali, Thārali, Dehradun and other areas have killed at least 135 people and 86 are feared dead. Episodes of human-wildlife conflict have also been frequent in the state.