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Lesson 1 of 3

SHORTCUT

States and capitals, by region

Learn them in geographical clusters, never as one alphabetical list.

The question

How many states and union territories does India have?

The trick

Never learn 28 states alphabetically. Split India into five regions and learn one region at a time — your memory stores places by map position, not by spelling.

Worked example

  1. 1North: Punjab (Chandigarh), Haryana (Chandigarh), Himachal (Shimla), Uttarakhand (Dehradun), UP (Lucknow), Rajasthan (Jaipur)
  2. 2West: Gujarat (Gandhinagar), Maharashtra (Mumbai), Goa (Panaji)
  3. 3South: Karnataka (Bengaluru), Kerala (Thiruvananthapuram), Tamil Nadu (Chennai), Andhra Pradesh (Amaravati), Telangana (Hyderabad)
  4. 4East: West Bengal (Kolkata), Odisha (Bhubaneswar), Bihar (Patna), Jharkhand (Ranchi)
  5. 5North-east — the Seven Sisters plus Sikkim: Assam (Dispur), Arunachal (Itanagar), Nagaland (Kohima), Manipur (Imphal), Mizoram (Aizawl), Tripura (Agartala), Meghalaya (Shillong), Sikkim (Gangtok)

So: 28 states and 8 union territories

Remember it like this

Chandigarh is the capital of two states at once — Punjab and Haryana — and is a union territory itself. That oddity alone is worth a mark almost every year.

In the exam

Learn the recent changes, because they are the favourite question: Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh became union territories in 2019, and Andhra Pradesh's capital moved to Amaravati after Telangana separated in 2014.

Why it works

Memory is spatial. Attaching each name to a position on a map gives your brain a second retrieval path, so if the name won't come the location often will.

Explain this to my childGet the words to teach it, in your language

Try it yourself

0/4 correct
  • 1

    Capital of Kerala?

  • 2

    Capital of Assam?

  • 3

    How many states does India have? (number only)

  • 4

    Which city is the capital of two states?