India's Central Province holds its biggest diamond and copper reserves
Madhya Pradesh literally means central province, and it sits squarely in the heart of India, bordered by five other states. It is the country's second largest by area, home to over 72 million people, and it holds India's largest reserves of both diamonds and copper beneath its forests and farmland.
People may have lived here very early: isolated Homo erectus remains turned up at Hathnora in the Narmada Valley, pointing to the Middle Pleistocene. The Bhimbetka rock shelters yielded painted pottery from the late Mesolithic, and farming cultures known as Kayatha and Malwa flourished in the west between roughly 2100 and 1500 BCE. In the sixth century BCE Ujjain grew into a major city and capital of the Avanti kingdom, later becoming western India's leading trading hub on the routes linking the Ganges plain to Arabian Sea ports.
Empires came and went. Chandragupta Maurya took the region around 320 BCE, and a Greek envoy named Heliodorus later raised a pillar near Vidisha. The Guptas held it in the 4th and 5th centuries until Hun invaders seized Gwalior, and a Malwa king, Yasodharman, stopped the Huns in 528. In medieval times the Chandela dynasty built the temples at Khajuraho, a high point of central Indian temple architecture, and King Bhoja of the Paramaras won fame as a polymath. The Marathas dominated most of the 18th century before the British carved the area into princely states.
After independence the old Central Provinces and Berar took the Madhya Pradesh name, with Nagpur as capital. A 1956 reorganisation merged it with neighbouring states and handed the Marathi-speaking Vidarbha region to Bombay State. It stayed India's largest state until 2000, when Chhattisgarh split off; Bhopal is now the capital.
The state leads India in pulses, soya bean, garlic and guava, and agricultural growth averaged above 20 per cent a year over four years, the highest nationwide. Forests cover 25.14 per cent of its land. Its economy ranks 10th in India, though per-capita income ranks only 26th and human development 23rd.
Source: Madhya Pradesh
