The state of Orissa has asked to change its name to Odisha (2009). This requires a constitutional amendment, which will be considered in 2010. The government of Karnataka state approved changing the name of Bangalore to Bengaluru as of 2006-11-01, but this change has not been passed by the national government, either. There is a move in Bihar to change the name of the capital from Patna to Pataliputra, the ancient (or traditional) name of the city. Patna is not a name imposed by the British, but dates back to the 16th century. Another faction wants to use the name Azimabad, which was the city's name for a period in the 18th century. Elsewhere, there is a move in Chhattisgarh to transfer the capital from Raipur to Nandghat. Uttaranchal state has changed its name to Uttarakhand. Assam voted on 2006-02-27 to rename itself Asom, but there has been a great deal of criticism of this decision and it hasn't been ratified by the Indian parliament. Pondicherry was renamed Puducherry on 2006-09-20. Roger Pountain and Paraskevas Renesis tipped me off to some of these changes.

The Indian government has initiated a process to split a state of Telangana from Andhra Pradesh. Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh, is located within the Telangana area, so there will be disputes over its disposition. The process began on 2009-12-09, and is expected to take about a year.

Celvin Ruisdael sent a link to an India Census  page showing the final results of the 2001 census. Hitherto I had been listing provisional results, which were mostly too low by a fraction of a percent. I've replaced them with the final results.

FIPS PUB 10-4 Change Notice 13 was issued on 2008-02-04. The only change listed under India is a repeat of the change to the spelling of Puducherry, already given in Change Notice 12.

FIPS 10-4 Change Notice 12, dated 2007-06-11, has three changes for India, not affecting FIPS codes. It acknowledges the new names Puducherry and Uttarakhand, and changes the status of Delhi to "national capital territory".

Seshadri Nadadhur pointed out the license plate codes used to identify the state or u.t. of Indian vehicles. I found the list of these codes at theCyberautocop  website. While working on that, I noticed that I had reversed the column headings for UPU and SC. I apologize for any inconvenience.

ISO 3166-2 Newsletter Number I-2 was published on 2002-05-21. It assigned new ISO codes to the three new states. It also showed macrons (long vowel marks) over some vowels in the state names, and gave Banga (probably should be Bangla) as an alternate name for West Bengal. It assigned the code CH to both Chandigarh and Chhattisgarh, by mistake. I got in touch with the ISO 3166-2 maintenance agency, and they changed the code for Chhattisgarh to CT, as shown in the table below. The change was officially announced in the next newsletter, ISO 3166-2 Newsletter Number I-3, published on 2002-08-20. Newsletter I-3 also corrected the placement of macrons over the a's in Rajasthan. Newsletter I-4, dated 2002-12-10, suppressed the alternate name for West Bengal.

Change Notice 7 to FIPS PUB 10-4 is dated 2002-01-10. It lists new codes resulting from the splitting of three states. The new codes are shown in the table below.

About 2001, there were proposals afloat to create still more new states. The possibilities included splitting National Capital Territory from Delhi; Harit Pradesh from Uttar Pradesh; Vindhyanchal from Madhya Pradesh; Telengana from Andhra Pradesh; Vidarbha from Maharashtra; Kodagu from Karnataka; Gorkhaland from West Bengal; Bundelkhand from Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh; and Bodoland from Assam. Specifically, it was proposed in 1998 to split the city of New Delhi (about 43 sq. km.) from Delhi union territory. Delhi would then become a state, and New Delhi would become National Capital Territory.

Erratum: In "Administrative Divisions of Countries", page 174, two divisions of India were listed with the wrong type. Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram were shown as union territories; they should be states. As stated in the Change History section, this change occurred in 1986.

Country overview: 

Short name	INDIA
ISO code	IN
FIPS code	IN
Languages	Hindi (hi), English (en), etc.
Time zone	+5:30
Capital	New Delhi

India in 1900 was a hodge-podge of British provinces under the direct sovereignty of the British crown, and small states ruled by Indian princes under British hegemony. The British position was called paramountcy, meaning simply that Britain had the power to overrule the native princes' actions. India at that time included present-day Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Aden (now part of Yemen). On the other hand, it excluded a few small enclaves in the possession of France and Portugal, and Sikkim, then a kingdom under British protection. When India obtained its independence on 1947-08-15, the area hitherto known as India was divided into two countries, India and Pakistan. The principle guiding the division was to allocate majority-Hindu areas to India and majority-Muslim areas to Pakistan. In the implementation, the large provinces of Bengal and Punjab were split between the two countries, and Pakistan was created as two pieces on opposite sides of the Indian subcontinent.

Other names of country: 

1. Danish: Indien
2. Dutch: India, Republiek India (formal)
3. English: Indian Union (formal), Republic of India (formal), Hindoostan (obsolete), Hindustan (obsolete)
4. Finnish: Intia
5. French: Inde f
6. German: Indien n
7. Hindi: Bharat
8. Icelandic: Indland
9. Italian: India f
10. Norwegian: India, Republikken India (formal)
11. Portuguese: Índia f, República f da Índia f (formal), União Indiana (Brazil) (formal)
12. Russian: Республика Индия (formal)
13. Spanish: India, República f de la India f (formal)
14. Swedish: Indien
15. Turkish: Hindistan Cumhuriyeti (formal), Hint (variant)

Origin of name: 

from Sanskrit sindhu: river, after the Indus River