What are the major ways through which Federalism is being practised in India?

Linguistic states

• The creation of linguistic states was the first and major test for democratic politics in our country.
• Many old states had vanished and many new states had been created.
• Areas, boundaries and names of the states had been changed.
• In 1947, the boundaries of several old states of India were changed in order to create new states.
• This was done to ensure that people who spoke the same language lived in the same state.

Language policy

• Our Constitution did not give the status of national language to any one language.
• Hindi and English were given the status of official languages.
• Hindi is spoken by 40% of the population of our country.
• There are 22 scheduled languages in our country (including Hindi and English).

Centre-state relations

• For a long time, the same party ruled both at the Centre and in most of the states.
• The state governments did not exercise their rights as autonomous federal units.
• If different parties ruled, then the Central government tried to undermine the power of the States. This changed significantly from 1990, when the era of coalition governments began.