Uttar Pradesh
Divisions, districts and cities

Uttar Pradesh is divided into 75 districts under these 18 divisions:

The following is a list of top districts from state of Uttar Pradesh by population, ranked in respect of all India.

Each district is governed by a District Magistrate, who is an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer appointed Government of Uttar Pradesh and reports to Divisional Commissioner of the division in which his district falls. The Divisional Commissioner is an IAS officer of high seniority. Each district is divided into subdivisions, governed by a Sub-Divisional Magistrate, and again into Blocks. Blocks consists of panchayats (village councils) and town municipalities. These blocks consists of urban units viz. census towns and rural units called gram panchayat.

Uttar Pradesh has more metropolitan cities than any other state in India. The absolute urban population of the state is 44.4 million, which constitutes 11.8% of the total urban population of India, the second-highest of any state. According to the 2011 census, there are 15 urban agglomerations with a population greater than 500,000. Uttar Pradesh has a complex system of municipalities. Nagar Nigam (Municipal Corporation) are urban local bodies in large cities such as Lucknow, Kanpur, Varanasi and cities having population more than 4 million. These governed by a mayor and councilors elected from wards. Nagar Palika Parishad or Municipal Council, serves medium-sized towns like Bela Pratapgarh, Jalaun, or Bisalpur and are governed by a chairperson and councilors. Nagar Panchayat which operate in smaller towns and semi-urban areas like Badlapur, Jaunpur, Bikapur, or Chilkana Sultanpur, are governed by a chairman and councilors. There are 14 Municipal Corporations, while Noida and Greater Noida in Gautam Budha Nagar district are specially administered by statutory authorities under the Uttar Pradesh Industrial Development Act, 1976.

In 2011, state's cabinet ministers headed by the then Chief Minister Mayawati announced the separation of Uttar Pradesh into four different states of Purvanchal, Bundelkhand, Avadh Pradesh and Paschim Pradesh with twenty-eight, seven, twenty-three and seventeen districts, respectively, later the proposal was turned down when the Akhilesh Yadav –lead Samajwadi Party came to power in the 2012 election.
detectable_format:title, startend:end_checker