Uttar Pradesh, Home to Almost 200 Million People at the 2011 Census, Holds 80 Lok Sabha Seats and 31 Rajya Sabha Seats and Had a GSDP of Rs 29.78 Lakh Crore in 2024-25

Uttar Pradesh is India’s most populous state, with almost 200 million people at the 2011 Census, which the Ministry of Statistics noted was more than the population of Brazil. It sends the largest bloc of any state to both Houses of Parliament, 80 of the 543 Lok Sabha seats and 31 of the 233 Rajya Sabha seats the Constitution gives the states and Union Territories. In 2024-25 its economy was worth Rs 29.78 lakh crore at current prices, according to Ministry of Statistics numbers that PRS Legislative Research compiled. Census figures below are from 2011, because the count that will replace them is still under way.

How the United Provinces became Uttar Pradesh

The Allahabad High Court’s own history, written by a member of its Bar, says the North Western Provinces and Oudh were joined as the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh in 1902. Lucknow became the capital in 1921, when a Legislative Council was formed there after the 1920 elections. The province was shortened to the United Provinces in 1937.

The present name took more than two years to settle. The Tribune reports that roughly 20 names were suggested after independence. At Banaras in November 1949 the provincial Congress committee voted 106 to 22 for “Aryavarta” over “Hind”, and the Constituent Assembly turned that proposal down. The Law Minister, B. R. Ambedkar, moved a Bill letting the Governor-General alter provincial names, and the Tribune says Congress members from the province worked out “Uttar Pradesh”, meaning northern province, as the compromise. The order renaming the province was published in the state gazette dated 24 January 1950, two days before the Constitution came into force on 26 January 1950 under Article 394.

The state lost its northern hills on 9 November 2000. The Uttar Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2000 created Uttaranchal from 13 districts, among them Dehradun, Nainital and Haridwar, and the Constitution lists it as Uttarakhand from 1 January 2007. The split cut the Rajya Sabha quota from 34 seats to 31, according to the footnotes in the Legislative Department’s edition of the Constitution. The Allahabad High Court gave up jurisdiction over the 13 districts, and Uttarakhand got its own High Court on the same day.

How Uttar Pradesh is governed

The Legislative Assembly, the Vidhan Sabha, has 403 elected seats, a strength the Assembly’s website says has applied since the November 2000 reorganisation. The Election Commission’s 8 January 2022 press note shows that 84 of the seats are reserved for Scheduled Castes and two for Scheduled Tribes, and that the roll on 1 January 2022 held 15,05,82,750 electors (about 15.06 crore). An Assembly lasts five years from its first meeting under Article 172. The previous one ran from 15 May 2017 to 14 May 2022, and the Assembly’s website says the current, eighteenth, was constituted on 11 March 2022.

Uttar Pradesh also has an upper house. Article 168 names it among the states with two Houses, and the Assembly’s website gives the Legislative Council, the Vidhan Parishad, 100 members. Article 171 caps a Council at one-third of the Assembly (134 for a 403-seat Assembly) with a floor of 40. As nearly as possible, one-third of its members are elected by the Assembly, one-third by members of local bodies, one-twelfth by graduates and one-twelfth by teachers, and the Governor nominates the rest for work in literature, science, art, the co-operative movement or social service. A Council is never dissolved: under Article 172(2), about one-third of its members retire every second year. Which other states have one is covered in our explainer on legislative councils.

In Parliament the state holds 80 Lok Sabha seats, 17 of them reserved for Scheduled Castes after the 2008 delimitation, according to a Ministry of External Affairs table, with Maharashtra next at 48. The Rajya Sabha figure is 31, against 19 for Maharashtra and 18 for Tamil Nadu. Under Article 82 the allocation of Lok Sabha seats stays as it is until figures from the first census after 2026 are published, and how seats are shared among states is the subject of a separate piece.

The state’s courts sit in two cities. The High Court began at Agra under letters patent dated 17 March 1866 and moved to Allahabad in 1869, according to its website, and its sanctioned strength is 160 judges. In 1948 the United Provinces High Courts (Amalgamation) Order merged it with the Chief Court of Oudh, set up at Lucknow in 1925. Article 14 of that Order requires at least two judges to sit at Lucknow for cases from the part of Oudh the Chief Justice directs. The court’s legal name is still the High Court of Judicature at Allahabad, and the city is now called Prayagraj. How such courts fit into the wider system is set out in our guide to Indian courts.

Hindi in the Devanagari script is the official language under the Uttar Pradesh Official Language Act, 1951, in force from 12 November 1951. An amendment that took effect on 7 October 1989 added Urdu as a second official language for purposes the government notifies, and a notification of the same day listed seven, such as accepting petitions in Urdu and publishing important rules in Urdu as well. A five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court upheld both on 4 September 2014. Chief Justice R. M. Lodha wrote that “Indian language laws are not rigid but accommodative”, and the national picture is in our piece on the 22 scheduled languages.

What the economy produces

The PRS analysis of the 2026-27 budget, built on Ministry of Statistics data, puts the state’s 2024-25 GSDP (gross state domestic product, the total value of goods and services produced in the state) at Rs 29,78,224 crore at current prices. It estimates real growth of 9 per cent that year, against 6.5 per cent for India’s GDP. Agriculture, manufacturing and services contributed 27, 26 and 47 per cent.

Per capita GSDP was Rs 1,24,366, up 11.6 per cent on 2023-24, while India’s per capita GDP was Rs 2,34,859. By tuput’s arithmetic the state figure is about 53 per cent of the national one. The state’s own first Economic Survey, presented on 9 February 2026 according to Business Today, uses a different estimate: GSDP of Rs 30.25 lakh crore for 2024-25, up from Rs 13.30 lakh crore in 2016-17, growth that averaged 10.8 per cent a year. It reports per capita income of Rs 1,09,844, a separate measure from per capita GSDP, and sets a target of a $1 trillion economy.

The same Survey, as Business Today reports it, credits the state with 15.66 per cent of India’s milk, the most of any state, and 737.4 lakh tonnes of foodgrains in 2024-25, 20.6 per cent of the national harvest. It puts debt at 28 per cent of GSDP. For 2026-27, presented on 11 February 2026, PRS records a fiscal deficit target of 3 per cent of GSDP (Rs 1,18,481 crore) and a revenue surplus of 1.6 per cent (Rs 64,458 crore), on a projected GSDP of Rs 39.8 lakh crore.

Two expressways show the building programme. The Roads Ministry’s backgrounder of 15 November 2021 describes the Purvanchal Expressway as 340.824 kilometres from Lucknow to Ghazipur, six lanes expandable to eight, built for Rs 22,494.66 crore across nine districts, with a 3.2-kilometre emergency airstrip for Air Force fighters. All India Radio reported that the 594-kilometre Ganga Expressway from Meerut to Prayagraj was inaugurated on 29 April 2026, running through 12 districts and cutting the trip from about 12 hours to about 6.

What sets Uttar Pradesh apart

No other state has a bloc this large in Parliament. The 80 Lok Sabha seats are about 15 per cent of the House, and the Ministry of Statistics added that Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra together, at 312 million, outnumbered the population of the United States in 2011.

The state launched One District One Product in 2018. An Invest India report of January 2021 says it picks one product from each of the state’s 75 districts and works on gaps in that product’s production, infrastructure and marketing, with the stated aim of adding to local income and keeping workers from leaving.

UNESCO inscribed the Kumbh Mela on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2017, and the festival rotates among four cities, one of them in this state. The Information and Broadcasting Ministry’s statement of 26 February 2025 says the Maha Kumbh there ran from 13 January to 26 February 2025 and reached “66 crores+” visitors by its last day, a count whose method our Kumbh explainer examines.

What comes next

The next Assembly election falls due in 2027, five years after the eighteenth Assembly was constituted. The 2026-27 budget projects a GSDP of Rs 39.8 lakh crore in PRS’s reading, and the state’s Economic Survey names a $1 trillion economy as the goal.

The first phase of Census 2027 has already reached the state. The Agra district administration lists self-enumeration from 7 to 21 May 2026 and house listing from 22 May to 20 June 2026 in Uttar Pradesh. The population count comes in a second phase, and it will replace the 2011 figures used here.