India Has 784 Districts, and the Collector, the Police Chief and the Elected District Panchayat Each Hold a Different Part of the Power in Them

In mid-October 2026 the front page of the Local Government Directory, the register of administrative units that the Ministry of Panchayati Raj keeps together with the Registrar General’s office, listed 784 districts across 28 States and 8 Union Territories. The 2011 Census, according to the Ministry of Statistics, counted 640. Each district has a Collector, who also holds the office of District Magistrate, a police chief under the state force, and in 675 cases an elected district panchayat. The three draw their powers from different laws.

The state draws the district, and the Census counts the result

Land revenue is Entry 45 of the State List in the Seventh Schedule, the list of subjects only state legislatures can make laws on, and a district began as a revenue area. The Uttar Pradesh Revenue Code of 2006 shows the pattern. Section 5 divides the state into divisions of two or more districts, districts of two or more tahsils (a tahsil is a sub-district headed by a revenue officer called the tahsildar), and tahsils of villages. Under section 6, the state government can merge, split, rename or abolish any of them by notification, but only after it has published the proposal and considered objections.

The Registrar General’s Census 2027 circular of 13 August 2025 told the Census directorate in each state to compile such changes up to 31 December 2025, the date the boundaries were to freeze for the next census. Its list of changes begins with the creation of new districts. The Local Government Directory also shows 7,092 sub-districts and 7,327 development blocks. By our arithmetic, the country has 144 more districts than it had in 2011.

The Collector heads the revenue administration

The same Code says the state government appoints in each district a Collector who is “in-charge of the revenue administration”. The Code builds a ladder under the Collector: Additional Collectors who exercise the Collector’s powers, Sub-Divisional Officers (the officers in charge of a sub-division), tahsildars and naib-tahsildars. The Collector also appoints the Revenue Inspectors, who supervise village land records, and the Lekhpals, who keep them (section 16). The route by which officers reach these posts is in our explainer on the civil services.

Here is how the ladder works for one family. A farmer in Uttar Pradesh dies and his son takes over the field. Section 33 requires the son to report the succession to the Revenue Inspector. If nobody disputes it, the Inspector enters the name in the khatauni, the record of rights. If someone does, the case goes to the tahsildar, who under section 35 issues a proclamation and decides it. The loser can appeal to the Sub-Divisional Officer within 30 days, and the record cannot change until the land revenue due has been paid (section 36).

The Collector’s own docket is narrower. Section 58 makes the Collector the authority for disputes over certain property that vests in the State, with an appeal to the Commissioner within 30 days. Section 98 says a Scheduled Caste landholder cannot sell, gift, mortgage or lease land to a person outside the Scheduled Castes without the Collector’s previous written permission. It lets the Collector grant that permission only when the owner has no surviving heir of the listed class, when the owner lives in another district or state for work or business, or when the Collector is satisfied for prescribed reasons. This reading is of the text updated to 5 March 2021, and later amendments may differ.

States write their own codes, so the Collector’s powers differ. A Maharashtra bill passed by the Assembly on 10 December 2025 and the Council on 11 December 2025 would replace section 42 of the Maharashtra Land Revenue Code of 1966. Under it, no Collector’s permission is needed to convert farmland to non-agricultural use if the plan under the state’s town planning law permits the use. The planning authority grants permission and collects a one-time premium of 0.1 per cent of market value for up to 1,000 square metres, 0.25 per cent up to 4,000 and 0.5 per cent above that.

The same officer is the District Magistrate

Titles vary. The Disaster Management Act, 2005, as the Ladakh authority’s page reproduces it, says “Collector/District Magistrate/Deputy Commissioner”. The criminal procedure law supplies the magistrate’s powers. Section 14 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, which has been in force since 1 July 2024 according to a Home Ministry reply in the Lok Sabha, says the state government appoints Executive Magistrates in every district and “shall appoint one of them to be the District Magistrate”. Section 17 makes all of them subordinate to the District Magistrate, and section 16 lets the District Magistrate set where each may act. What changed in the criminal law that year is in our explainer on the 2024 codes.

The best-known power is in section 163. A District Magistrate, a Sub-divisional Magistrate or another specially empowered Executive Magistrate can issue a written order telling a person to stop doing something, or to deal with property in a certain way, when that is likely to prevent danger to life, a riot or a breach of public tranquillity. The order can be addressed to the public at large in an area and can be passed without hearing the person in an emergency. It lapses after two months, though the state government may extend it by up to six months more to prevent danger to life or a riot.

In a disaster the Collector wears another hat. Under section 25 of the 2005 Act, the district authority is chaired by the Collector, with the Superintendent of Police and the Chief Medical Officer as members and an officer not below Additional Collector as chief executive. In East Sikkim the co-chair is the Zilla Adakshya, an elected representative.

The police chief commands a state force

Section 3 of the Police Act, 1861 vests superintendence of the police in the state government. Section 4 puts administration across a district in a District Superintendent, but “under the general control and direction of such Magistrate”, meaning the District Magistrate. Police is Entry 2 of the State List. Cities that have a Commissioner of Police can be handled differently, since section 14(6) of the 2023 Sanhita lets a state give a Commissioner the powers of an Executive Magistrate. Under section 15 a police officer of Superintendent’s rank can be named a Special Executive Magistrate for a given area or task.

The 1861 wording puts district policing under the Magistrate’s general direction. In the Prakash Singh case of 2006, as the Supreme Court summarised it on 24 April 2017 in the Senkumar judgment, the Court ordered a State Security Commission and a minimum two-year tenure for the state’s Director General of Police, chosen from the three senior-most officers on a panel. The Senkumar bench wrote that the directions were given “so as to insulate the police from external pressures and maintain the rule of law and not of persons”. Kerala’s Police Act of 2011 carries the principle down to the district, with a two-year minimum for Superintendents of Police and Commissioners in charge of police districts, subject to listed exceptions such as disciplinary action.

District courts sit outside this chain. Article 233 has the Governor appoint district judges in consultation with the High Court, and Article 235 vests control of the district courts in the High Court, as the explainer on the court system sets out.

The district panchayat is the elected tier, and there are fewer than districts

Article 243B requires every state to have panchayats at the village, intermediate and district levels, though a state of 20 lakh people or fewer may skip the middle tier. Part IX of the Constitution came into force on 24 April 1993. Article 243G says a state legislature “may” give panchayats the power to plan and run schemes, including the 29 subjects of the Eleventh Schedule, which include agriculture, minor irrigation, drinking water, primary and secondary schools and primary health centres. Whether a district panchayat has those powers in practice is therefore decided by state law, and the full account of terms, reserved seats and money is in our explainer on panchayats and municipalities.

The Local Government Directory counts 675 district panchayats, 6,769 block panchayats and 255,396 village panchayats. That is 109 fewer district panchayats than districts. Part of the gap is constitutional: Article 243M keeps Part IX away from Scheduled Areas and tribal areas, from Nagaland, Meghalaya and Mizoram, and from the hill areas of Manipur that have District Councils, and it exempts the hill areas of Darjeeling from the district level.

The body that joins town and village is the District Planning Committee under Article 243ZD, in force from 1 June 1993. It consolidates the plans of the panchayats and municipalities into one draft plan for the district and sends it to the state government. At least four-fifths of its members must be elected by and from the elected members of the district panchayat and the municipalities, in proportion to the rural and urban population. State law decides who chairs it.

The Aspirational Districts Programme scores districts in public

NITI Aayog launched the Aspirational Districts Programme in January 2018. A UNDP appraisal published on NITI’s site in December 2020 says 117 districts were selected at first, that West Bengal never joined, and that 112 remain, which is the number in NITI’s list. NITI’s programme page now says 117. Progress is tracked on 49 indicators in five themes, on the public Champions of Change dashboard, and districts are ranked by the change they make, a “delta” ranking. The appraisal says a Central Prabhari Officer of Additional or Joint Secretary rank is attached to each district and works with the District Collector or Magistrate. Health and nutrition carry 30 per cent of the index.

NITI’s first delta ranking, covering March to May 2018, was “largely based on data filled by District teams”, and household surveys by Tata Trusts and IDInsight were to be added. The appraisal checked results against matched districts. It compared the 2018 and 2020 changes in 112 or 113 aspirational districts with districts from the same states that were not in the programme, and found the aspirational districts ahead on most health indicators. One example is the share of antenatal registrations made in the first trimester, which rose about 4.5 percentage points more. Life-insurance enrolments under the PMJJBY scheme rose by about 406 more per lakh people. Two measures did not improve more: sex ratio at birth and the share of bank accounts linked to Aadhaar. The report adds that its figures are probably underestimates, because non-aspirational districts did not get the same third-party data checks.

A district-level case from NITI’s 2025 compendium is Khagaria in Bihar. The District Magistrate started a distribution of bicycles to 700 of the district’s 1,539 ASHAs, the village health workers, in August 2024. According to the district’s account in the compendium, overall antenatal registrations went from 88.16 to 98 per cent, full immunisation of children from 94.61 to 100 per cent and home-based newborn care coverage from 74.3 to 91 per cent by June 2025.

NITI extended the model downward in January 2023 with the Aspirational Blocks Programme, which now covers 513 blocks in 331 districts, including at least one block from every aspirational district, and tracks 39 indicators.