♦ Ganpat Vasava, Gujarat Speaker. Born: June 1, 1971

♦ Shankar Chaudhary, Gujarat minister. Born: June 1, 1970

♦ Mangubhai Patel, Gujarat minister. Born: June 1, 1944

♦ Ramanlal Patkar, Gujarat MLA (BJP). Born: June 1, 1952

♦ Jitubhai Chaudhary, Gujarat MLA (Cong). Born: June 1, 1964

And the list continues....

Ahmedabad, June 2: As many as 36 of Gujarat's 182 MLAs were born on June 1, Assembly records say.

A joke played by the gods? A hardly believable coincidence with a near-zero mathematical probability? Or proof of the validity of astrology and its "auspicious days"?

If you are one of these 36, just blame your schoolteacher.

Raghav Patel, MLA from Jamnagar Rural, almost blushes when you ask him about the "coincidence".

"It's not our real date of birth - it's certainly not mine," the BJP member said before narrating a strange story.

"My parents were illiterate farm labourers; we never obtained birth records," he said.

"When I was taken to school for enrolment, the teacher decided on June 1 as my date of birth. Eleven other children were enrolled with me on the same day, and the teacher wrote down June 1 as the date of birth for all 12 of us."

Patel said the practice of schools making up fictitious birthdays for their pupils was widespread in rural Gujarat, where people rarely kept birth records, and from where most of these 36 MLAs come.

Speaker Ganpat Vasava, urban development minister Shankar Chaudhary, forest minister Mangubhai Patel and Congress MLA Ishwarbhai Patel - all have a story similar to Raghav Patel's.

But why would so many different teachers in different schools and in different decades all pick the same date?

Motibhai Vasava, BJP member and three-time MLA from tribal-dominated Narmada district, helped solve the mystery.

"In those days, the academic school year in Gujarat started in June. Since enrolment and the related paperwork happened on the first day of school, which was usually June 1, the teachers simply jotted that date down as the date of birth of the new students," Motibhai said.

Sometimes the school opened on a different date in June, or a student might enrol a few days after school opened. Fifteen members of the current Assembly have official dates of birth that fall between June 2 and 30, making it a grand total of 51 June-borns out of 182.

The previous Assembly had 28 members with June 1 as their official date of birth, and the one before that had 31.

Motibhai said the practice was so endemic that his teacher wouldn't listen to him when he said his birthday was February 16 - his parents had told him that, though they had no documents - and jotted down "June 1".

A huge proportion of the elderly and middle-aged in rural Gujarat have June 1 as their official date of birth.

But from around 1971, Motibhai said, the practice began ebbing as the state government began maintaining birth records - and offering health check-ups to young mothers and newborn children - in the villages.

One of the 36 - Jayantibhai Rathwa, MLA from Jetpur in Vadodara - was born in 1974. It could not be ascertained whether June 1 was his real birthday because his phone was switched off.

All the 36 are male, a further coincidence probably explained by the low number of women MLAs in Gujarat: just 15, of whom only about half a dozen were born before 1971.

The Speaker and ministers Chaudhary and Patel said they now celebrated their birthdays on June 1 although they knew they weren't born on that date.

"For me, June 1 is my birthday. It may not be the real one but it is official," Patel said.