Around 300 BCE, Megasthenes (the Greek envoy at Chandragupta Maurya’s court) described Pataliputra (Palibothra) as governed by a remarkably specialised municipal system: a council of 30 officials divided into six boards of five members each. This makes his chronicle a major witness to sophisticated urban governance in Mauryan Bharat.
A Specialised Civic Bureaucracy
According to fragments of his lost account titled Indica, preserved and referred to by later Greek writers (Strabo, Arrian, Diodorus and Pliny), the six boards respectively controlled and supervised crafts and industry, foreigners, registration of births and deaths, commerce and sales, inspection of manufactured goods and collection of a one-tenth sales tax. Such functional separation highlights administration based on defined responsibilities rather than arbitrary personal rule.
Governance as Public Service
The system addressed everyday civic needs: protecting and assisting foreign visitors, maintaining population records, regulating markets and weights, ensuring product standards and collecting taxes systematically. His description thus presents Pataliputra not merely as a royal capital but as a well-managed city with institutional mechanisms of early Indian administrative capacity for public order, economic regulation and social welfare.