West Bengal Is Home to a UNESCO-Listed Festival, the Indian Part of the World's Largest Mangrove Forest and 42 Lok Sabha Seats, and Has Had No Upper House Since 1969

UNESCO’s World Heritage List describes the Sundarbans as the largest area of mangrove forest in the world and the only one inhabited by the tiger, and the 133,010 hectares it lists are in West Bengal. In December 2021 the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage added Durga Puja in Kolkata to its Representative List. The same state sends 42 members to the Lok Sabha and 16 to the Rajya Sabha, and its 294-member Legislative Assembly is the only house of its legislature.

How West Bengal came to exist

Section 3 of the Indian Independence Act, 1947 said that from the appointed day, 15 August 1947, the Province of Bengal would cease to exist and two new provinces, East Bengal and West Bengal, would be set up in its place. The Act left the exact line to a boundary commission and named the districts that would count as East Bengal until its award came. That work is told in the piece on the Radcliffe awards.

The state then changed shape three more times. Cooch Behar was a princely state until its ruler ceded authority to the Dominion of India by an agreement of 28 August 1949, and the district administration’s own page says it merged with West Bengal on 19 January 1950.

The Bihar and West Bengal (Transfer of Territories) Act, 1956 fixed 1 November 1956 as the day Bihar handed over the Purulia subdivision of Manbhum district, apart from three police-station areas, along with a strip of Purnea district’s Kishanganj subdivision. Purulia became a district of its own and the Purnea strip joined Darjeeling district.

The last change came at midnight between 31 July and 1 August 2015. Under the India-Bangladesh land boundary agreement, 51 Bangladeshi enclaves covering 7,110 acres became Indian territory, and The Tribune reported that about 14,000 people lived in them. Cooch Behar’s District Magistrate helped run the survey of what those residents wanted.

How West Bengal is governed

The Assembly has 294 seats, as PRS Legislative Research notes in its profile of the 17th Assembly. The state once had a second house. Parliament’s West Bengal Legislative Council (Abolition) Act, 1969, dated 25 July 1969, abolished its Legislative Council. Six other states still keep one, as the guide to states with two houses explains.

In Parliament the state holds 42 Lok Sabha seats. After the 2008 delimitation, 10 of them are reserved for Scheduled Castes and 2 for Scheduled Tribes, according to the Ministry of External Affairs table. Its 16 Rajya Sabha seats come from the Fourth Schedule of the Constitution.

The Calcutta High Court was created by Letters Patent of 14 May 1862, and The Leaflet calls it the first High Court in British India. The West Bengal Official Language Act, 1961 makes Bengali the language of official purposes across the state and adds Nepali in the Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Kurseong subdivisions. The copy of the Act that PRS hosts, with amendments up to 2021, adds Kurukh, Kamtapuri, Rajbanshi, Kurmali and Telugu to a list that already had Urdu, Hindi, Santhali, Odia and Punjabi. Each of those five newer languages can be used for official notices, petitions and signposts in any district, subdivision, block or municipality where its speakers exceed ten per cent, from dates the State Government notifies.

Who lives there and what the economy produces

NITI Aayog’s 2025 brief on the state ranks West Bengal fourth among states by population in the 2011 Census, with 7.5 per cent of India’s total, on an area of 88,752 square kilometres. Literacy was 76.3 per cent, Scheduled Castes were 23.5 per cent of the population and Scheduled Tribes 5.8 per cent. Life expectancy in 2020 was 72.3 years, above the national average. The brief projects a population of 99.1 million for 2023. The next census is under way, so the shares above are 2011 figures.

The Reserve Bank of India’s Handbook of Statistics on Indian States, compiled from National Statistics Office data, gives West Bengal a net state domestic product of Rs 14,85,628 crore at current prices in 2023-24, sixth among 33 states and union territories behind Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat. For 2024-25 the figure is Rs 16,32,104 crore, fourth among the 18 states and union territories with published figures. The state’s own budget documents, as reported by PRS, put gross state domestic product at Rs 18,12,372 crore in 2024-25. PRS estimates real growth of 7.6 per cent in 2025-26, against 7.4 per cent for India’s GDP.

Income per head is lower than the national figure. PRS estimates West Bengal’s per capita GSDP at Rs 1,98,451 in 2025-26, against Rs 2,51,393 for India. NITI Aayog adds that the state’s share of national GDP fell from 6.8 per cent in 1990-91 to 5.8 per cent in 2021-22, and that real growth averaged 4.3 per cent a year between 2012-13 and 2021-22 against 5.6 per cent for India. In 2021-22 services made up 54.9 per cent of the state’s gross value added, industry 24 per cent and agriculture 21.1 per cent.

West Bengal grows about 81 per cent of India’s raw jute, CARE Ratings reports, citing the Office of the Jute Commissioner.

The state targets a lower deficit in 2026-27, while its own taxes are a smaller share of output than the all-state average. PRS says own tax revenue was 5.4 per cent of GSDP in 2024-25, against 6.3 per cent for states on average in the Reserve Bank’s data. The 2026-27 budget targets a fiscal deficit of 2.9 per cent of GSDP, below the 3 per cent limit the 16th Finance Commission recommends. That Commission set the state’s share of the divisible pool of central taxes at 7.22 per cent for 2026 to 2031, down from 7.52 per cent in the 15th Commission’s period, a system explained in the guide to how the Finance Commission divides tax revenue.

What sets West Bengal apart

The Sundarbans, inscribed in 1987, have 78 recorded mangrove species, according to UNESCO, which estimates that 34 per cent of the Sundarbans mangrove forest lies in India and 66 per cent in Bangladesh. UNESCO’s statement says the mangroves hold the single largest population of tigers in the world, animals that swim long distances and feed on fish, crab and water monitor lizards. When the Intergovernmental Committee listed Durga Puja in 2021, it also commended the organisations behind the festival for involving marginalised groups and women.

Darjeeling’s hills are run through a body created by agreement, in the country of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway. A memorandum signed on 18 July 2011 by the Government of India, the West Bengal government and the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha created the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration, an autonomous body for the Darjeeling and Kalimpong subdivisions and extended areas of Kurseong. Its Sabha has 45 elected members and 5 nominated by the Governor. It has powers over 59 subjects but no power to make laws, and the agreement keeps the hills inside West Bengal while recording the party’s demand for a separate state.

What comes next

Census 2027 began with houselisting between April and September 2026, and population enumeration is scheduled for February 2027. It is the first census in India by digital means, with data collected on mobile apps, and it will replace the 2011 figures above.