Inter-State Council: India’s Formal but Underused Forum for Centre-State Dialogue

Most discussions of India’s federal machinery focus on the GST Council or NITI Aayog’s Governing Council, both covered elsewhere in this series. Far less attention goes to the Inter-State Council, a constitutional body specifically designed as India’s general-purpose forum for Centre-state dialogue. This article explains what it is and why it has struggled to become the active federal bargaining table its founders envisioned.

What the Inter-State Council Is

The Inter-State Council was established in 1990 under Article 263 of the Constitution, following a recommendation from the Sarkaria Commission, a body set up specifically to examine and recommend improvements to Centre-state relations, according to Drishti IAS’s explainer on the Council’s origins. It is chaired by the Prime Minister and includes all state Chief Ministers, the Chief Ministers of union territories that have their own legislatures, administrators of other union territories, and six Union Cabinet ministers, giving it, on paper, one of the broadest and most senior memberships of any federal coordination body in the country.

The Sarkaria Commission’s Broader Legacy

The Sarkaria Commission itself, which recommended the Council’s creation, produced roughly 247 separate recommendations covering a wide range of Centre-state friction points, including the Governor’s role, restraint in using Article 356 to impose President’s Rule on states, and reforms to how All-India Services officers are managed, according to background covered by Vajiram & Ravi’s overview of the Commission’s work, with many of those recommendations, according to the same source, still only partially implemented decades later.

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How Rarely It Has Actually Met

Despite its broad membership and constitutional standing, the Council has met remarkably infrequently since its 1990 establishment. According to IndianRepublic.in’s analysis, headlined “Why Inter-State Councils Rarely Matter,” the body has held only around 12 to 13 full council meetings across more than three decades, a strikingly sparse meeting record for a body meant to serve as India’s central forum for resolving Centre-state disagreements, with commentators specifically noting the Council went unconvened for roughly a decade at one stretch before it resumed meeting again in 2016.

The Standing Committee and the Punchhi Commission Report

Below the full Council sits a Standing Committee, chaired by the Union Home Minister, which took up the substantial task of examining the 273 recommendations produced by the Punchhi Commission, a second major Centre-state relations review submitted in 2010. According to a Press Information Bureau release covering the process, the Council’s Standing Committee completed deliberations on most of the Punchhi Commission’s recommendations across successive meetings, though Raksha Anirveda’s coverage of the process noted that translating these deliberations into actual, on-the-ground implementation has remained slow and uneven across different recommendation areas.

Why the Council Has Been Overshadowed

Policy commentary examining the Council’s limited role generally attributes its diminished prominence to the rise of other, more frequently active federal coordination bodies covered elsewhere in this series, including the GST Council, which meets considerably more often and has direct, binding fiscal decision-making authority, and NITI Aayog’s Governing Council, which brings all state Chief Ministers together under the Prime Minister’s chairmanship on a more regular basis. Critics argue the Inter-State Council, by contrast, functions more as a formal, occasional deliberative gathering than a genuine ongoing bargaining forum, especially when compared with India’s Zonal Councils, regionally organised coordination bodies chaired by the Union Home Minister that have continued meeting on a considerably more regular schedule, including the 27th Western Zonal Council’s meeting in Pune in February 2025 and the 32nd Northern Zonal Council’s meeting in Faridabad in November 2025, according to coverage of both gatherings.

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What Reviving the Council More Actively Could Mean

Given the Council’s broad constitutional mandate and senior membership, some federalism scholars have argued a more actively convened Inter-State Council could serve as a genuinely useful, politically neutral forum for resolving exactly the kind of Centre-state friction covered throughout this category, from Finance Commission devolution disputes to Governor-related controversies, precisely because its constitutional design already brings every state’s chief executive into direct, regular dialogue with the central government, a structural advantage that, critics argue, has gone significantly underused relative to its potential given how infrequently the body has actually convened since 1990.

What This Means for Ordinary Federalism Watchers

For citizens trying to understand how India’s federal disputes actually get resolved day to day, the Inter-State Council’s low profile is itself an instructive data point: it illustrates that having a well-designed constitutional mechanism on paper does not automatically translate into that mechanism becoming the primary venue where real disputes get worked out, since political actors, both the Centre and individual states, have in practice gravitated toward newer, more frequently convened bodies for actually resolving disagreements, leaving the Council’s considerable formal authority somewhat underused relative to what its constitutional design would allow.

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Bottom Line

The Inter-State Council, established in 1990 under Article 263 following the Sarkaria Commission’s recommendation, brings together the Prime Minister and every state Chief Minister as a formal constitutional forum for Centre-state dialogue, but has met only around a dozen times in over three decades, a sparse record that critics attribute to the body being overshadowed by more frequently active coordination mechanisms like the GST Council and NITI Aayog’s Governing Council, even as its Standing Committee has made genuine, if slow-moving, progress digesting the Punchhi Commission’s 273 recommendations on Centre-state relations.

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Abhyudaya Verma