Zonal Councils: India’s Forum for Inter-State Coordination

Two bodies in Indian polity have nearly the same job description, and aspirants swap them in answers all the time. The Inter-State Council sits on Article 263 of the Constitution and is chaired by the Prime Minister. The Zonal Councils sit on an ordinary Act of Parliament and are chaired by the Union Home Minister. One is constitutional and singular, five are statutory and regional, and every one of them can only advise. That’s three differences in a single sentence, and getting them backwards is the most common way to lose a mark on this topic. There’s a second trap sitting right next to it. The North Eastern Council looks like a sixth zonal council, gets counted as one in half the notes floating around, and isn’t one. Sort out those two confusions and Zonal Councils turn into one of the smaller, cleaner topics in the whole federalism unit.

What a Zonal Council actually is

A Zonal Council is a statutory advisory body that puts the Chief Ministers of a group of neighbouring states in one room with the Union Home Minister, so they can talk through problems that cross their borders before those problems reach a court or a tribunal. Five of them exist: Northern, Central, Eastern, Western and Southern.

Statutory, not constitutional. That word is doing real work, so unpack it. Zonal Councils were created by Part III, Sections 15 to 22, of the States Reorganisation Act, 1956, which is an ordinary law passed by a simple majority. Section 15 brings the five councils into existence, Section 16 fixes who sits on them, and Section 21 tells them what they may discuss. Nothing in the Constitution mentions them. Which means Parliament could redraw the zones, merge them, or abolish all five tomorrow with the same majority it uses to pass any other Bill. Compare that with the Inter-State Council, which rests on Article 263 and can’t be legislated out of existence, only left unused.

So the honest one-line version is this: Zonal Councils are a deliberative forum, not an institution with teeth. They have no funds of their own, no power to bind anybody, and no way to enforce a single thing they agree on. That sounds like a fatal flaw. Hold that thought, because it’s actually the design, and there’s a reason for it.

Where the idea came from, and the fear behind it

Zonal Councils exist because of what the country was afraid of in the mid-1950s. The States Reorganisation Commission, chaired by Fazl Ali with K.M. Panikkar and H.N. Kunzru as members, submitted its report in 1955 and recommended redrawing India’s internal map along linguistic lines. The States Reorganisation Act followed, taking effect on 1 November 1956 and producing fourteen states and six Union Territories.

Everybody could see the risk. Give each major language group its own state and you settle one set of agitations while manufacturing another: harder regional identities, sharper boundary claims, and states that treat each other as rivals rather than as parts of one union. The Act redrew the map. Something had to keep the map from hardening into walls.

Jawaharlal Nehru supplied the answer during the parliamentary debate on the Commission’s report. His suggestion was that the reorganised states be grouped into four or five zones, each with an advisory council, so they could “develop the habit of cooperative working”. Read that phrase carefully, because it explains the whole design. Not the power of cooperative working. The habit. Nehru wasn’t building an enforcement body. He was building a standing appointment, on the theory that Chief Ministers who sit across a table every year argue differently from Chief Ministers who only meet in court. Whether that theory holds is a fair question, and we’ll get to it. But once you know the councils were built to create a habit, their weakness stops looking like an oversight. Weakness was the point. A forum with power would have been boycotted; a forum with none can be attended without conceding anything. That trips up almost everyone reading this topic for the first time, because we’re trained to score institutions by their powers, and this one was deliberately built without any.

The five councils, and who sits in which one

Five councils cover twenty of India’s twenty-eight states and six of the eight Union Territories. Read the table for the memberships, then read the two paragraphs under it, because that’s where the questions live.

Three memberships moved after 1956, and each move is a small history lesson. Sikkim sat in the Eastern Zonal Council until the North Eastern Council (Amendment) Act, 2002 made it the eighth member of the North Eastern Council, at which point it stopped being an Eastern member. It’s the only state that ever switched families. Telangana joined the Southern Zonal Council on its creation under the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014. And Jammu and Kashmir was a full state member of the Northern Zonal Council until the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019 split it into two Union Territories, both of which stayed in the same zone.

Now the detail that decides more questions than any other row above. Count the Union Territories in the table and you get six: Delhi, Chandigarh, J&K, Ladakh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, and Puducherry. India has eight. Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep belong to no zonal council at all, and they aren’t in the North Eastern Council either. Two territories sit outside the entire scheme, which is exactly the kind of fact a matching question is built from.

Who’s actually in the room

The Union Home Minister is the chairman of all five Zonal Councils. Not five different chairmen, one. That single fact tells you more about how these councils behave than any list of functions will.

Everything else rotates or repeats. The Vice-Chairman is the Chief Minister of one of the member states, holding the post by rotation for one year at a time, which is the scheme’s small gesture at not letting one state dominate its neighbours. Each state sends its Chief Minister plus two other ministers nominated by the Governor, so three political voices per state. Each Union Territory in the zone sends up to two members nominated by the President.

Then there are the advisers, who matter more than their title suggests and are not members. Each council gets one person nominated by NITI Aayog (the Planning Commission’s nominee before 2015), plus the Chief Secretary and one development commissioner or equivalent officer from every member state. Advisers sit in, brief, and shape the paper. They don’t vote, though since the council never really votes on anything binding, that distinction is thinner than it sounds.

Notice what this composition is not. There’s no weighted voting, no ratio between Union and state voices, no quorum drama. Set it against the GST Council under Article 279A, where the Centre holds one-third of the weight, the states together hold two-thirds, a three-fourths majority carries a decision, and that decision binds. Same era of cooperative-federalism language, completely different machinery. The GST Council was built to decide. The Zonal Council was built to meet.

The Standing Committee of Chief Secretaries, where the work happens

Each Zonal Council has a Standing Committee made up of the Chief Secretaries of the member states, and if you only remember one thing about how these councils function in practice, remember this body rather than the council itself.

Here’s why. A Zonal Council meeting is a room full of Chief Ministers with about half a day of attention between them. Nothing complicated survives that setting. So the Standing Committee meets first, takes the raw list of grievances the states have sent in, throws out what’s already settled, resolves what can be resolved between officials, and hands the council a short agenda of items that genuinely need a political decision. Every item that reaches a Chief Minister has already been through a Chief Secretary who couldn’t fix it.

That’s a familiar Indian pattern once you spot it: the political body gets the headline, the officials’ committee does the sifting. The Inter-State Council has exactly the same architecture, with its own Standing Committee chaired by the Union Home Minister since 1996.

One more piece of plumbing worth knowing. The Zonal Councils used to have their own secretariat. It was merged into the Inter-State Council Secretariat under the Ministry of Home Affairs with effect from 1 April 2011, so today the same office services both the constitutional body and the five statutory ones. Read that either way you like: sensible consolidation, or one more sign that nobody thought the councils needed a dedicated establishment.

Advisory means advisory, and the zone-shaped hole

Section 21 of the States Reorganisation Act, 1956 says a Zonal Council “shall be an advisory body”, and then lists what it may advise on: any matter of common interest in economic and social planning, any matter concerning border disputes, linguistic minorities or inter-state transport, and anything arising out of the reorganisation of states itself. It may discuss, and it may recommend to the Union and to the states. That’s the ceiling.

So what do they actually recommend on? Things like inter-state road and rail links, sharing of power and water, coordination between state police forces on criminals who cross a border, banking access in border districts, dues one state owes another after a bifurcation. Unglamorous coordination work. It gets sneered at in exam notes and it shouldn’t be. A truck that clears a state boundary without a three-hour argument is worth more to more people than most constitutional theory.

But the ceiling is real, and there’s a second limit that almost nobody teaches. A Zonal Council can only touch a dispute if both quarrelling states share the same zone. Test it against live cases. Punjab and Haryana fighting over Chandigarh and the Sutlej-Yamuna Link canal are both in the Northern Zonal Council, so that argument can at least be tabled. Andhra Pradesh and Telangana settling the leftovers of their 2014 split are both Southern, so the machinery fits. Now try Maharashtra and Karnataka over Belagavi, one of the oldest inter-state boundary disputes in the country. Maharashtra is Western. Karnataka is Southern. No Zonal Council has jurisdiction over both, so the single most famous boundary dispute in India falls straight through the gap in a scheme whose own Section 21 lists “border disputes” as a function. That’s not a failure of will. It’s a failure of geometry, built into the map in 1956 and never fixed.

The North Eastern Council is not a Zonal Council

The North Eastern Council is a separate statutory body created by the North Eastern Council Act, 1971, which came into force in 1972. It has eight members: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, and Sikkim, added by the amendment of 2002. Its headquarters is at Shillong. It is not the sixth Zonal Council, and calling it one is wrong on three counts.

Different parent law, first. The five Zonal Councils come from the States Reorganisation Act, 1956; the NEC comes from its own Act fifteen years later, because the 1956 zoning scheme never covered the region in the first place.

Different job, second, and this is the substantive difference. A Zonal Council advises. The NEC plans and funds. The amendment of 2002 made it a regional planning body for the North Eastern Area, and it runs schemes and sanctions projects with a budget. No Zonal Council has ever had a rupee to allocate.

Different home, third. The NEC was under the Ministry of Home Affairs until 2001, when it moved to the Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER). In 2018 the Union Home Minister was made its ex-officio Chairman, with the DoNER Minister as Vice-Chairman, which muddies the picture a little because the same person now chairs all five Zonal Councils and the NEC. Same chair, different body, different Act, different powers. Keep those apart and the trap disarms itself.

The North East also carries a second layer no other region has, in the Sixth Schedule autonomous district councils. That’s a different device for a different problem, but it’s part of why the region sits outside the zonal scheme rather than inside it.

Zonal Council versus Inter-State Council

Both are advisory. That’s the trap, because “both are advisory” tempts you into thinking they’re the same species. Read down the rest of the column instead.

The row that pays is the last one, and the one above it. The Inter-State Council owes its existence to the Sarkaria Commission, which reported in 1988 and pushed for a permanent constitutional forum; the Council was finally set up by Presidential Order on 28 May 1990. And here’s the number that reframes the whole comparison: the Inter-State Council has met eleven times since 1990, most recently on 16 July 2016. Eleven full meetings in more than three decades. The constitutional body with the Prime Minister in the chair is the one that struggles to convene. The statutory ones, chaired by a Home Minister who can schedule a zone at a time, meet a good deal more often. Constitutional status turns out to be a poor predictor of activity.

Do Zonal Councils actually work?

Partly, and mostly at the level nobody writes essays about. Here’s the fair verdict, in both directions.

What works: they meet, and they meet more than the national body does. They clear administrative logjams that would otherwise sit in files for years, because a Chief Secretary who has to answer for an item at a Standing Committee tends to close it before the meeting. They give small states a table where a large neighbour has to at least listen. And the frequency has picked up over the last decade, with the Home Ministry using the zonal format to push a common agenda across regions.

What doesn’t: the ceiling never moves. Advisory in 1956, advisory now. No funds, no enforcement, no dispute-settling power, so anything that actually matters to a state’s interests gets tabled, noted, and referred somewhere with real authority. The zone-shaped hole means the biggest boundary disputes are structurally out of reach. And the chair belongs to the Union. A forum built for states to talk to each other is convened, agenda-set and presided over by the Centre, which is a strange way to run horizontal federalism.

Both the Sarkaria Commission and the Punchhi Commission (2007 to 2010) noticed the same thing and recommended the same fix: use them more, meet at least twice a year, let the states drive the agenda. The recommendations are decades apart and nearly identical, which tells you the diagnosis was right and the treatment never happened.

My reading is that Zonal Councils get judged against the wrong benchmark. Held up against the GST Council they look useless, because the GST Council decides and they don’t. Held up against the alternative, which is two states with a grievance and no room to raise it short of the Supreme Court, they’re worth keeping and worth using harder. They aren’t instruments of cooperative federalism in any strong sense. They’re a standing calendar invitation between neighbours. That’s genuinely useful and genuinely limited, and an answer that says both is better than an answer that picks a side.

How to study and remember Zonal Councils

Don’t memorise five membership lists as five lists. Build them from geography and then patch the exceptions, which is a much shorter thing to carry.

Start with the map. The zones are close to what you’d guess: Northern is the Punjab-Haryana-Rajasthan-Himachal block with Delhi and Chandigarh, Central is the Hindi heartland minus Bihar, Eastern is Bihar-Jharkhand-Odisha-Bengal, Western is Maharashtra-Gujarat-Goa, Southern is the four southern states plus Telangana. Guessing gets you about ninety per cent of the table.

Then learn only the exceptions, because that’s all a question can ask. Sikkim left Eastern for the NEC in 2002. Telangana joined Southern in 2014. J&K stayed Northern but as two UTs after 2019. Andaman and Nicobar and Lakshadweep are in nothing at all. Four exceptions, and every membership question is built from one of them.

Then fix the four numbers. Five Zonal Councils. Eight NEC members. One chairman for all five, the Union Home Minister. Eleven Inter-State Council meetings since 1990. Numbers attached to a reason stick; bare numbers don’t.

Then the three distinctions that carry the marks. Zonal Council versus Inter-State Council: statutory against constitutional, Home Minister against Prime Minister, zone against nation. Zonal Council versus North Eastern Council: 1956 Act against 1971 Act, advice against planning and money, MHA against DoNER. And advisory versus binding: Zonal Council and Inter-State Council both advise, the GST Council binds.

For a Mains answer, the sentence that lifts it above a description is the structural one: a forum designed to reduce friction between neighbouring states can’t reach the friction between states in different zones, and it’s chaired not by the states but by the Union. Say that, name Belagavi, and you’ve made a point most answers won’t. Pair this with your notes on regionalism and on federalism generally, because Zonal Councils only make sense as one answer to a question those two topics ask.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are Zonal Councils and who created them?

Zonal Councils are five statutory advisory bodies created by Part III, Sections 15 to 22, of the States Reorganisation Act, 1956, to promote cooperation between neighbouring states after the map was redrawn on linguistic lines. They are the Northern, Central, Eastern, Western and Southern Zonal Councils. The idea was suggested by Jawaharlal Nehru during the parliamentary debate on the States Reorganisation Commission report.

Are Zonal Councils constitutional bodies?

No. They are statutory bodies, created by an ordinary Act of Parliament and not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. Parliament can restructure or abolish them by a simple majority. The Inter-State Council is different: it flows from Article 263 and rests on constitutional authority.

Who is the chairman of the Zonal Councils?

The Union Home Minister is the chairman of all five Zonal Councils. The Vice-Chairman is the Chief Minister of one member state, holding the post by rotation for one year at a time. Each state is represented by its Chief Minister and two ministers nominated by the Governor.

Is the North Eastern Council a Zonal Council?

No. The North Eastern Council was created by its own North Eastern Council Act, 1971, has eight members including Sikkim since 2002, is headquartered at Shillong, and works under the Ministry of DoNER. Unlike a Zonal Council, it plans and funds projects rather than only advising. The Union Home Minister has been its ex-officio Chairman since 2018, which is the source of most of the confusion.

Which states or Union Territories are not in any Zonal Council?

The eight North Eastern states are covered by the North Eastern Council instead. Among the Union Territories, Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep belong to no zonal council and to no North Eastern Council either, so they sit outside the scheme entirely.

How is a Zonal Council different from the Inter-State Council?

Four differences. Source: statutory under the 1956 Act against constitutional under Article 263. Chairman: Union Home Minister against Prime Minister. Scope: one zone against the whole country. Number: five against one. Both are purely advisory, which is the similarity that causes the mix-up.

Which Zonal Council is Sikkim in?

None. Sikkim was a member of the Eastern Zonal Council until the North Eastern Council (Amendment) Act, 2002 made it the eighth member of the North Eastern Council, at which point it left the Eastern zone. It’s the only state to have moved between the two schemes.

Are Zonal Council decisions binding on states?

No. Section 21 of the States Reorganisation Act, 1956 makes a Zonal Council an advisory body: it may discuss matters of common interest and advise the Union and the states concerned, and that’s the limit. It holds no funds and has no power to enforce anything it recommends.

Practice Questions

1. Zonal Councils in India were established under which of the following?

a) Article 263 of the Constitution
b) The States Reorganisation Act, 1956
c) The Government of India Act, 1935
d) A Presidential Order issued in 1990

Answer: b) The States Reorganisation Act, 1956

2. Who is the chairman of each of the five Zonal Councils?

a) The Prime Minister
b) The Chief Minister of the largest state in the zone, by rotation
c) The Union Home Minister
d) The Governor of the state hosting the meeting

Answer: c) The Union Home Minister

3. Consider the following statements about the North Eastern Council:

1. It was constituted under the North Eastern Council Act, 1971. 2. Sikkim was added as a member in 2002. 3. It is one of the six Zonal Councils created under the States Reorganisation Act, 1956.

Which of the statements given above are correct?

a) 1 and 2 only
b) 2 and 3 only
c) 1 and 3 only
d) 1, 2 and 3

Answer: a) 1 and 2 only

4. Which of the following pairs is correctly matched?

a) Central Zonal Council: Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal
b) Western Zonal Council: Goa, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu
c) Southern Zonal Council: Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Lakshadweep
d) Northern Zonal Council: Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand

Answer: b) Western Zonal Council: Goa, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu

5. With reference to the Inter-State Council and the Zonal Councils, which one of the following statements is correct?

a) Both are constitutional bodies
b) Both are statutory bodies
c) The Inter-State Council is constituted under Article 263 while the Zonal Councils are statutory, and both are advisory
d) The Inter-State Council is advisory while Zonal Council recommendations are binding on member states

Answer: c) The Inter-State Council is constituted under Article 263 while the Zonal Councils are statutory, and both are advisory

Mains-style questions

1. “Zonal Councils were designed to build a habit of cooperation, not a power to compel it.” Examine this claim with reference to the composition and functions of the Zonal Councils under the States Reorganisation Act, 1956.

2. Compare the Zonal Councils with the Inter-State Council in terms of constitutional status, composition and performance. Which has served Indian federalism better, and why?

3. The North Eastern Council is often mistaken for a sixth Zonal Council. Distinguish between the two, and explain why the North East required a separate institutional arrangement.

4. Zonal Councils are empowered to discuss border disputes, yet India’s most persistent boundary disputes fall outside their reach. Analyse this structural limitation and suggest reforms.

5. “Horizontal federalism in India is chaired by the Union.” Critically examine this statement with reference to Zonal Councils, the Inter-State Council and the GST Council.

The most useful thing you can do with Zonal Councils is stop grading them as institutions and start reading them as an answer to a question. In 1956 the country handed every big language group a state of its own, which settled a decade of agitation and quietly created twenty new borders that nobody had to care about before. The Zonal Councils are what the Union offered instead of a rule: a room, a calendar, a rotating chair, and no power at all. It’s a modest offer, and modest is why it survived seventy years without ever being resented. But a room only works if people show up and bring something to it, and the record says the Union shows up more reliably than the states do. Which means the real weakness of the Zonal Councils was never Section 21. It’s that we built a forum for states to talk to each other and then handed the Centre the gavel.

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