Post Independence
After Indian independence and the Partition of India in 1947, the new Indian government grouped the former princely states of Gujarat into three larger units; Saurashtra, which included the former princely states on the Kathiawar peninsula, Kutch, and Bombay state, which included the former British districts of Bombay Presidency together with most of Baroda state and the other former princely states of eastern Gujarat. In 1956, Bombay state was enlarged to include Kutch, Saurashtra, and parts of Hyderabad state and Madhya Pradesh in central India. The new state had a mostly Gujarati-speaking north and a Marathi-speaking south. Agitation by Marathi nationalists for their own state led to the split of Bombay state on linguistic lines; on 1 May 1960, it became the new states of Gujarat and Maharashtra. The first capital of Gujarat was Ahmedabad; the capital was moved to Gandhinagar in 1970.
In Gujarat a few new towns have been established since Indian Independence in 1947. Most of these are more like settlements established near existing urban centres. Gandhidham, Sardarnagar and Kubernagar are three rehabilitation towns more like refugee settlements than self-sufficient towns. The last two now form part of the city of Ahmedabad. They were established for the resettlement of Sindhi Hindu refugees arriving from Pakistan. Ankleshwar and Mithapur were two of the earlier industrial towns established in Gujarat. A complex of three small townships for the oil refinery, the Fertilizer Factory and Petro-chemicals plant also came up near Vadodara. Kandla is the only new port town established in the state. The capital city of Gujarat, Gandhinagar is one of the three planned cities in India and has excellent infrastructure.
Read more about this topic: History Of Gujarat
Famous quotes containing the words post and/or independence:
“A demanding stranger arrived one morning in a small town and asked a boy on the sidewalk of the main street, “Boy, where’s the post office?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, then, where might the drugstore be?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about a good cheap hotel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Say, boy, you don’t know much, do you?”
“No, sir, I sure don’t. But I ain’t lost.””
—William Harmon (b. 1938)
“We commonly say that the rich man can speak the truth, can afford honesty, can afford independence of opinion and action;—and that is the theory of nobility. But it is the rich man in a true sense, that is to say, not the man of large income and large expenditure, but solely the man whose outlay is less than his income and is steadily kept so.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)