India to usher in its 29th state India's ruling Congress party on Wednesday will begin the process of carving the new state of Telangana out of prosperous Andhra Pradesh, a move likely to fuel demands for further major changes to India's political map. Telangana, an impoverished, water-scarce area surrounding the booming city of Hyderabad, will be India's 29th state when it is finally created, a long bureaucratic process that could take several months, or longer. The Congress and its alliance partners announced on Tuesday that they would proceed with the controversial division of Andhra Pradesh, after stalling for years on a decision with repercussions for one of India's most economically dynamic cities. Under the plan, Hyderabad, a hub of India's IT industry and a base for foreign companies such as Google and Microsoft, will serve as the joint capital of the new state of Telangana, and the rump of the old state, for 10 years, while a new capital is located and built for the remains of the old state. Security was tightened across Andhra Pradesh after the announcement by the Congress party's governing body on an issue which has generated intense passions. The creation of Telangana has been championed in an emotional campaign by its impoverished residents, who believe statehood will give local youth a greater chance at government jobs, and boost the region's economic prospects. The decades-long campaign had reached such a fever pitch in recent years that some young people from the region immolated themselves to show their support for statehood. But residents of other parts of Andhra Pradesh, one of India's more prosperous and better governed states, have fiercely opposed division. The future of Hyderabad, which has drawn large investment from wealthy business people from across Andhra Pradesh, has been an issue of particular concern. The Telangana debate reflects a sentiment held by many Indians - especially in its poorer regions - that the country's states are too big to be governed effectively, and that this is exacerbating economic disparities between regions. But analysts say the Congress's decision to create Telangana is less about the merits of the region's statehood claim than about hard political maths ahead of parliamentary elections, expected next year. In India's last parliamentary polls in 2009, Congress swept Andhra Pradesh, winning 33 of the state's 42 parliamentary seats, a rich haul that has made the region crucial for the party's political fortunes. But the death in a plane crash of the popular chief minister who led Congress's parliamentary campaign in Andhra Pradesh in 2009 has led to a damaging split over his succession, with the late leader's son leading a popular breakaway faction. The Telangana region has 17 parliamentary seats. The decision to grant it statehood is expected to help Congress win many of them, even if it forfeits support in the rest of the state where it was faring poorly anyway. "It is an act of political desperation by the Congress," said Siddharth Varadarajan, editor of The Hindu newspaper. There is no great conviction or political principle involved here other than an expedient response to a situation where the party is looking at major electoral losses in Andhra Pradesh. The Congress move is already fuelling renewed agitation for separate states in parts of West Bengal, Assam and Maharashtra. India's political map was mostly drawn in the decade after independence, with the creation of states along linguistic lines to defuse potential ethnic strife by ensuring local government was carried out in citizens" mother tongues. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party made some revisions more than a decade ago, carving three new states - Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand - out of three huge states in the Hindi heartland, but no new states have been created since.