UTTAR Pradesh, India's most populous state, may soon exist no longer - and it is the state's own chief minister who is writing its epitaph.
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Nearly 200 million people live in Uttar Pradesh (the name is Hindi for Northern Province) and, if it were an independent country, it would be the fifth largest in the world, bigger than Brazil and only just behind Indonesia.
But its size, while giving it enormous political influence, makes it nearly impossible to govern.
Its western districts are fertile and prosperous, while the southern Bundelkhand has suffered serious successive droughts. Low-caste families are a huge electoral bloc, but many live in poverty.
The state has provided eight of India's 14 prime ministers, and is the homeland of the inestimable Nehru-Gandhi family.
But this week UP's firebrand Chief Minister, Kumari Mayawati, has advocated the abolition of her own job, proposing to split the mega-state into four more manageable pieces - Purvanchal, Paschim Pradesh, Bundelkhand and Awadh Pradesh - which recognise the claims for autonomy by various ethnic groups.
''The move would fulfil the much-awaited aspirations of the people living in each of the regions,'' Ms Mayawati said.
''Sixteen per cent of the country's population lives [in UP]. It also has a gigantic area of 240,000 square kilometres and that is what makes it unwieldy.''
India currently has 28 states, but the division of the country of 1.2 billion people is ongoing.
A decade ago, three new states were carved out of existing ones.
Ms Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party, which represents low-caste Dalits, also known as untouchables, has a majority in the state parliament and will pass a resolution proposing the state's dissolution. But the formal power to reorganise states lies with the central government in Delhi.
The Congress Party, in power there, has long regarded UP as a key electoral heartland, and the party's rising star and scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, Rahul Gandhi (pictured), has been touring the state in an effort to drum up votes ahead of next year's state elections.
Critics of Ms Mayawati are already labelling her move a political stunt. They forecast that she is headed for defeat at the next poll, but that she believes by acceding to regional demands for autonomy, she can secure enough support in the new legislatures - and perhaps a new job for herself.
''She wants to win another election, any election,'' a senior government official told The Age.
It could also prove politically tricky for India's central government to accede to the proposal while it refuses to address long-standing calls for a new state of Telangana in southern Andhra Pradesh.
