Union Territories of India

By Dooit UPSC expert · 10 October 2026 · 11 min read

In thirty years of coaching, I have seen the topic of the Union Territories of India cost students marks for a silly reason: they treat UTs as "small states" and reason about them as if a state government runs them. It does not. A Union Territory is administered by the Union itself, through the President, and that single difference unlocks almost every question the examiner can set on Part VIII of the Constitution.

So fix the core idea first. India's territory, under Article 1, is divided into the territories of states, the Union Territories, and such other territories as may be acquired. States enjoy a federal share of power; Union Territories are centrally administered units carved out for strategic, administrative, cultural or historical reasons — a far-flung island chain, a merged former colony, the national capital. Today there are 8 Union Territories, and the whole governance scheme sits in a compact bundle of articles that rewards precise reading. Let me walk you through it the way I teach it in the first Polity revision cycle — structure first, then the two special children, Delhi and Puducherry, that examiners love.

How many Union Territories are there, and which ones?

The number is not static — it has changed in living memory, which is exactly why it is tested. The current count is eight. Two recent events reshaped the map: in 2019 the former state of Jammu and Kashmir was reorganised into two Union Territories, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh; and in 2020 the two separate UTs of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and of Daman and Diu were merged into a single UT. Learn the list cold, with capitals and the administrator's title, because Prelims has asked this in matching form more than once.

The constitutional scheme: Part VIII, Articles 239 to 241

Everything substantive about Union Territories lives in Part VIII of the Constitution. Six articles do the heavy lifting, and if you can state what each one does, you have covered perhaps eighty per cent of what this topic can throw at you.

Article 239 is the foundation. It says that every Union Territory shall be administered by the President, acting through an administrator appointed by him with such designation as he may specify. This is the heart of the matter: a UT is not run by a chief minister answerable to a state assembly; it is run on the President's behalf. The same article also allows the President to appoint the Governor of a neighbouring state as the administrator of an adjoining UT — the device that lets the Governor of Punjab double as Chandigarh's Administrator.

Article 239A, inserted by the Fourteenth Amendment Act of 1962, lets Parliament create by law a local legislature or a council of ministers, or both, for certain Union Territories. It is under this enabling power that Puducherry received its legislative assembly. Note the key fact that trips candidates up: Puducherry's legislature exists because an ordinary Act of Parliament created it, not because the Constitution itself guarantees it.

Article 239AA is the special regime for Delhi — important enough to deserve its own section below. Article 239AB is its companion, allowing the President to step in when the constitutional machinery in Delhi fails, broadly the UT equivalent of President's Rule.

Article 240 empowers the President to make regulations for the peace, progress and good government of specified Union Territories — a remarkable power, because such a presidential regulation can have the same force as an Act of Parliament and can even repeal or amend a law made by Parliament in its application to that UT. Article 241 allows Parliament to constitute a High Court for a Union Territory, which is why UTs are mapped to particular High Courts rather than each having its own.

The Delhi model: why Article 239AA is a favourite

Delhi is the Union Territory examiners return to again and again, because its arrangement is genuinely unusual. Article 239AA, inserted by the 69th Constitutional Amendment Act, 1991, gave the Union Territory the name National Capital Territory of Delhi, a popularly elected Legislative Assembly and a Council of Ministers headed by a Chief Minister to aid and advise the Lieutenant Governor.

But the autonomy is deliberately incomplete. The Delhi Assembly can make laws on matters in the State List and Concurrent List as they apply to Delhi, with one crucial carve-out: it cannot legislate on three subjects — public order, police and land. These remain with the Union, because Delhi is the seat of the national government and the Centre cannot surrender control of the capital's security and real estate. This single fact — the three reserved subjects — is the most-tested point in the entire Union Territory syllabus. Memorise it as a trio and anchor it to a reason: the capital's safety stays with the nation.

Puducherry, by contrast, draws its legislature from Article 239A and an ordinary law, the Government of Union Territories Act, 1963. Its Assembly enjoys somewhat wider room than Delhi's because the public-order, police and land restriction is not written into its scheme in the same constitutional way. Jammu and Kashmir, after the elections held in 2024, also functions with a Legislative Assembly, though with powers more limited than a full state and with the Lieutenant Governor retaining substantial authority. Ladakh has no legislature at all. Lay these side by side and the "gradations of self-rule" story writes itself — a ready-made Mains point on asymmetric governance.

State versus Union Territory: the comparison that settles it

Most confusion on this topic dissolves the moment you place a state and a UT in the same frame. Here is the table I ask every student to reproduce from memory.

If you have studied the office of the Governor of a state, draw the contrast out loud: a Governor heads a self-governing state and is largely bound by the advice of an elected council of ministers, whereas a Lieutenant Governor of most UTs is the administration, acting for the President. The same logic you learned for the President of India — that the President is the constitutional fulcrum of the Union executive — is exactly what makes the President the administering authority for every Union Territory.

Representation, courts and the First Schedule

Union Territories are not political orphans — they send members to Parliament. All UTs are represented in the Lok Sabha, and Delhi and Puducherry additionally have representation in the Rajya Sabha, because they have legislative assemblies whose members form the electoral college for those seats. The states and the Union Territories themselves are listed in the First Schedule of the Constitution, which is why a change in the number of UTs requires Parliament to amend that Schedule.

On the judicial side, remember that UTs do not each have a dedicated High Court. Under Article 241, they are placed within the jurisdiction of an existing High Court — for example, several smaller UTs fall under the High Courts of neighbouring states, while Delhi has its own High Court. This mapping is a quiet favourite in Prelims matching questions, so note it when you revise the High Courts of India.

The traps examiners set — and how to beat them

After grading thousands of test papers, I can list the mistakes that recur with almost mechanical regularity. Guard against these:

1. Counting UTs wrong. The answer is eight, not seven or nine. Candidates who learnt the list before 2019–2020 still miscount. Fix the two events — the 2019 J&K reorganisation and the 2020 DNH–DD merger — to the number.
2. Assuming every UT has a legislature. Only Delhi, Puducherry and (since 2024) Jammu and Kashmir do. The other five are under direct Union administration with no elected assembly.
3. Forgetting Delhi's three reserved subjects. Public order, police and land stay with the Union. A question that asks what the Delhi Assembly cannot legislate on is testing exactly this.
4. Confusing the source of Delhi's and Puducherry's legislatures. Delhi's assembly flows from the Constitution itself (Article 239AA, 69th Amendment); Puducherry's flows from Article 239A plus an ordinary Parliamentary law.
5. Over-reading the Lieutenant Governor. In most UTs the LG is the administration; only where there is an elected government does the aid-and-advise relationship enter the picture, and even then the LG's role is wider than a Governor's.

How to revise this without cramming

Do not treat the eight UTs as eight disconnected facts; that knowledge evaporates in a fortnight. Instead, build one mental spine: the President administers through an administrator (Article 239), Parliament may add a legislature for some (Article 239A), and Delhi gets its own constitutional deal (Article 239AA). Hang every detail — capitals, LG versus Administrator, the reserved subjects, the High Court mapping — on that spine. Then test yourself actively: cover the table and rebuild it, and attempt a few mixed MCQs so your brain learns to choose under pressure rather than merely recognise. Active recall on a factual cluster like this is worth ten passive readings — the same principle we press in our wider Indian Polity preparation strategy.

Union Territories reward the aspirant who finishes the topic early and revises it often. It is low in volume, stable in content apart from a few evolving current-affairs threads, and high in return — the sort of patch where ten disciplined minutes a week quietly protects two or three marks across Prelims and Mains.