Chapter 11: Urban Settlements
Every ten years, a small army of enumerators walks the length and breadth of India, knocking on doors and filling in forms. Most of what they record confirms what everyone already knew. But when the numbers from the 2011 Census were tabulated, one figure caught statisticians by surprise.
The count of census towns — settlements the government still runs as villages, yet which the Census treats as urban — had leapt from 1,362 to 3,894 in a single decade. Nearly three times as many places had quietly crossed the line from rural to urban.
No mayor had been sworn in for them. No boundary had been redrawn. These places had not been declared towns; they had become towns. Somewhere along the way most of their working men had stopped farming and taken up work in workshops, shops, transport and services. Their houses had crowded closer together. By the Census’s own test, they were no longer villages.
That is the strange thing about a town. You cannot always point to the moment a village becomes one. There is no fence marking where the countryside ends and the city begins — only a gradual thickening of people, of buildings, and of non-farm work.
This chapter is about that line, and about everything that lies on the urban side of it.
Diagram
Fig. 11.0-1 Caption: A settlement does not switch from rural to urban; it shades across a continuum. Brief: Draw a horizontal gradient bar reading, left to right: isolated farmstead → hamlet → village → large village → census town → statutory town → city → metropolis. Beneath the bar, three thin arrows pointing rightward with short labels showing what rises along it: ‘share of workers in non-farm jobs’, ‘density of buildings’, ‘population size’. Emphasise that no single point divides rural from urban — shade the bar smoothly from a plain green left end to a dense grey right end, with no hard block boundaries. No numbers on the bar.
11.1 What Makes a Place Urban
We use the words town and village every day, yet drawing the line between them is harder than it looks. This section asks what actually makes a place urban, and how the Census of India settles the question.
11.1.1 The Rural–Urban Continuum
Everybody seems to know a city when they see one, but no scholar has produced a definition that everyone accepts. What separates a town from a village is not its size but what its people do for a living.
In villages most people work in primary activities — work that draws directly on the land and water, such as farming, forestry, fishing and mining. In towns most people work instead at secondary activities, which means making things in industry, and at tertiary activities, which means trade, transport and services.
The shift from one to the other is gradual, not sudden. As you travel outward from a city, farmland does not begin at a fixed line; buildings thin out and fields thicken by degrees. This gradual shading is the rural–urban continuum — the idea that rural and urban are the two ends of a single gradient rather than two separate boxes.
Because the change is gradual, you cannot point to the spot where urbanity ends and rurality begins. A large village with a busy market and a bus stand may feel more town-like than a quiet administrative centre nearby. Fig. 11.0-1 shows this gradient from farmstead to metropolis.
11.1.2 The Five Criteria for Defining an Urban Place
Because a single yardstick is never enough, geographers judge a place against a set of criteria at once. These criteria fall into five kinds: demographic, economic, social, morphological and functional.
The demographic criterion looks at population size and density — how many people live in a place and how closely they are packed together. The economic criterion looks at what people do, above all the share of workers employed outside agriculture. The social criterion looks at ways of living, including literacy and the mixing of people from many backgrounds.
The morphological criterion looks at physical form — houses standing close together, laid out along streets, with a built-up look. The functional criterion looks at what a place does for the region around it: whether it serves as a centre of trade, administration or services.
No single one of these is decisive, because urban areas are many-sided. A place may score high on one criterion and low on another. This is why any workable definition must lean on more than one measure — and why the Census, which needs a rule it can apply the same way everywhere, leans on the criteria it can actually count.
11.1.3 The Census Definition of an Urban Area
The Census of India has changed its definition several times, but the modern test rests on three conditions it can measure, reached by two routes.
By the first route, any place that has a municipality, a municipal corporation, a cantonment board or a notified town area committee is treated as urban on account of its administrative status alone. Such places qualify whatever their exact size.
By the second route, any other place is urban only if it satisfies all three of the following conditions together: a minimum population of 5,000; at least 75 per cent of the male working population engaged in non-agricultural pursuits; and a density of at least 400 persons per square kilometre. Fig. 11.1-1 sets out the decision.
Flowchart
Fig. 11.1-1 Caption: How the Census of India decides whether a place is urban. Nodes: A settlement → governed by a municipality, corporation, cantonment board or notified town area committee? yes → urban: statutory town; no → tested against three conditions together → population 5,000 or more? AND at least 75% of male workers in non-farm work? AND density 400 persons per km² or more? all three met → urban: census town; any one condition not met → rural settlement
A density of 400 persons per square kilometre is a modest floor. One square kilometre equals 100 hectares, so 400 people spread over it works out to just 4 persons per hectare — far more crowded than open farmland, yet nothing like a city ward, where tens of thousands may share a single square kilometre. The threshold is meant to catch the start of urban crowding, not its extreme.
There is also a margin for judgement. The Directors of Census Operations, in consultation with the State governments, may treat certain places as urban even when they narrowly miss the test — major project colonies, areas of intensive industrial activity, railway colonies and important tourist centres among them. These are places that behave like towns without quite fitting the arithmetic.
11.2 Classifying Towns and Cities
Once a place counts as urban, the Census sorts it further — by how it is governed and by how many people live in it. These two ways of classifying urban places answer different questions, and they do not always agree.
11.2.1 Statutory Towns and Census Towns
The 2011 Census recognised two kinds of urban area, and the difference between them comes down to who runs the place.
A statutory town is an urban unit that some law has defined as urban — it has an urban local government of its own, such as a municipal corporation, a municipality, a cantonment board, a notified town area committee, a town panchayat or a nagar palika (a municipal council). These are the places that qualify by the first, administrative route.
A census town is different. It has no urban local body of its own and is still governed as a village, usually by a gram panchayat (the village council). Yet it meets all three of the measured conditions — 5,000 people, three-quarters of its male workers in non-farm jobs, and a density of 400 persons per square kilometre. It is urban by the test but rural by administration.
The gap between the two is not a technicality. A census town has become urban in how its people earn and live, while its form of government has not caught up. This is why so much of India’s recent urban growth appears in the census-town column: between 2001 and 2011 the number of census towns rose from 1,362 to 3,894, nearly trebling, even as the number of statutory towns rose only modestly.
11.2.2 The City and the Size-Class Ladder
Governance is one axis; sheer size is the other. The Census arranges every urban place on a ladder of six size classes, from the largest down to the smallest, shown in Table 11.1.
An urban place of one lakh (1,00,000) people or more sits in Class I, and it is these Class I places that the Census calls cities. A town with fewer than a lakh is still a town, not a city, however busy it may feel.
The many small towns at the bottom of the ladder can be misleading. Though Class VI and Class V towns are numerous, the great majority of India’s town-dwellers actually live in the Class I cities at the top. Urban population, in other words, is concentrated in a handful of large places, not spread evenly across all towns.
11.2.3 Metropolitan Cities and Megacities
At the very top of the ladder sit the giants. The Census calls an urban agglomeration or city of one million (10 lakh) people or more a metropolitan city, also known as a million-plus city.
Metropolisation — the rise of these million-plus cities — is largely a story of the years since Independence. In 1901 there was just one, Kolkata; Mumbai joined it in 1911, and for the next three decades the count stayed at two. After Independence it climbed steeply, reaching 5 in 1951, 12 in 1981, 35 in 2001 and 53 in 2011. Fig. 11.2-1 traces the rise.
Graph
Fig. 11.2-1 Caption: The number of India’s metropolitan (million-plus) cities, 1901 to 2011. Brief: Line graph. X-axis: census years 1901, 1911, 1921, 1931, 1941, 1951, 1961, 1971, 1981, 1991, 2001, 2011. Y-axis: number of metropolitan cities (0 to 55). Plot the single series: 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 5, 7, 9, 12, 23, 35, 53. Emphasise the flat stretch to 1941 and the steepening climb after Independence. Source: Census of India (1901–2011).
Beyond the million-plus mark lies a rarer rank. A megacity is a city of ten million (one crore) people or more. By the 2011 Census India had three: Greater Mumbai, with about 18.4 million people in its urban agglomeration, Delhi with about 16.3 million, and Kolkata with about 14.1 million. Chennai, at close to 8.7 million, was the largest city that had not yet crossed the ten-million line.
11.3 Urban Agglomeration, Sprawl and Conurbation
A growing city rarely stays inside the line drawn around it. It spills over its boundary, throws out suburbs, and in time may run into its neighbours. This section names the three forms that outward growth takes.
11.3.1 Urban Agglomeration
A city’s built-up area seldom stops neatly at its municipal boundary. A railway colony, a university campus, a port area or a military camp often grows up just outside the statutory limit but is physically joined to the town. Such a unit is called an outgrowth.
To capture the whole continuous city rather than just the part inside the boundary, the Census uses the idea of the urban agglomeration (UA). A UA is a continuous urban spread made up of a town together with its adjoining outgrowths, or of two or more physically joined towns together with their outgrowths.
The Census sets two conditions. A UA must contain at least one statutory town, and the total population of all its constituents put together must be at least 20,000 (as counted in 2011). It may take shape in three ways: a town with one or more contiguous outgrowths; two or more adjoining towns, with or without outgrowths; or a city and one or more adjoining towns with their outgrowths, all forming one continuous stretch.
So a city, the industrial township pressed against its edge, the railway colony and the campus just beyond the municipal line — all physically continuous — together form a single urban agglomeration, such as Kanpur UA. One thing a UA cannot do is cross a state boundary; it stops at the state line even where the built-up area does not.
11.3.2 Urban Sprawl: Ribbon Settlement and Infill
As a city grows, it expands outward and swallows the land around it, most of it farmland. This outward areal spread is called urban sprawl. Wealthier residents move out from crowded centres to open suburbs where they can build larger houses, and the built-up ring around the city widens year by year.
Sprawl does not fill the countryside evenly. It begins along the major roads radiating from the town, because these give the easiest access. Buildings string out in a thin line beside each road, forming what is called ribbon settlement. Fig. 11.3-1 shows how this happens.
Diagram
Fig. 11.3-1 Caption: Ribbon settlement forms along the roads first; infill later fills the wedges between them. Brief: Two side-by-side plan views of the same town. Left panel: a town centre with four or five roads radiating outward like spokes; show built-up development strung in thin ribbons along the roads only, with open fields in the wedges between them; label one road-side strip ‘ribbon settlement’. Right panel: the same town later, with the wedges now filled in by buildings and new connecting roads so the built-up area is continuous; label a filled wedge ‘infill’. Arrow between the panels pointing left to right to show the passage of time.
As demand for suburban homes rises, the open land between the ribbons is built over and new roads are laid to reach it. This filling-in of the gaps is called infill. Small towns and villages within commuting distance are then drawn in as well, and the city keeps growing outward as one continuous mass. Where the widening suburbs of two neighbouring towns finally meet, the outcome is a conurbation.
11.3.3 Conurbation
When several originally separate towns grow outward and coalesce into one continuous urban belt, usually along the main routes running between them, the belt is called a conurbation. The term was coined by the planner Patrick Geddes in 1915, joining ‘continuous’ and ‘urbation’.
A conurbation differs from an urban agglomeration in both scale and origin. An agglomeration is a single town and its immediate outgrowths counted as one unit. A conurbation is far larger — a belt in which several separate cities, each with its own agglomeration, have grown together along a shared corridor. India’s clearest example runs along the Hugli river in West Bengal.
A conurbation, then, is not one big city that spread outward from a single centre; it is many towns that grew towards one another until they touched. That distinction matters for planning, because water, drainage, traffic and housing in the Hugli belt cannot be handled town by town — the towns now share one built-up fabric. Elsewhere in India, similar belts are beginning to form where strings of towns along busy transport corridors expand towards each other.
11.4 Why Urban Centres Grow Where They Do
A town is not scattered at random across the map. It sits where something concentrates people — a route, a resource, a market, a shrine, a seat of power — on ground that will allow a settlement to grow. This section works through the factors that decide the spot.
11.4.1 Transportation and the Break of Bulk
Of all the factors, transport is the oldest and the most powerful. The three main modes — water, rail and road — arrived in that order, and towns grew up around each in turn.
Water transport came first, long before rail or road. The ancient world’s towns clustered along rivers and sea routes, because water carried trade cheaply. The Harappan cities of Mohenjodaro and Harappa stood on the Indus and the Ravi; in India, Rupnagar grew on the Sutlej, Ayodhya on the Saryu and Mathura on the Yamuna. Places away from the water routes were left out of this growth.
Railways followed in the mid-nineteenth century — India’s first line opened in 1853. At first the railways simply connected the river towns, but soon the tracks reached far inland, and towns began to grow along the lines instead of the rivers. Great railway-junction towns, such as Mughalsarai and Tundla, owe their growth to the railway alone.
Motor transport came in the twentieth century, after the pattern of towns was largely set. Its main effect was to raise a ring of smaller towns around the big cities. A satellite town is a smaller town that grows in the orbit of a large city, depending on it for work while easing the crowding at its centre. Faridabad, Noida, Ghaziabad, Sonipat, Bahadurgarh and Gurugram grew this way around Delhi.
The Break of Bulk
Towns very often grow where there is a break in transport — a point where one mode of carriage ends and another begins. The idea was set out by C. H. Cooley in 1930: population and wealth tend to collect where transport breaks.
At such a point, goods must be moved from one vehicle to another — a transfer called transhipment, or the break of bulk. This transfer needs labour, warehouses, banks and commercial services, so shops, hotels, schools and hospitals spring up to serve the people it draws. In time a town takes shape. Fig. 11.4-1 traces the chain.
Flowchart
Fig. 11.4-1 Caption: How a break in transport gathers a town around itself. Nodes: goods arrive by one mode, say rail → the route ends; the goods cannot continue on it → break of bulk: cargo is unloaded and reloaded onto the next mode, say road → transhipment needs labour, warehouses, banks and services → workers and businesses settle at the break point → a town grows and, in time, gains its own industries and functions
The clearest breaks in India are at the foot of the hills, where the railway from the plains ends and the road into the mountains begins. Dehradun, Kotdwar and Kathgodam grew at such points. Ports are the largest breaks of all, where sea transport gives way to rail and road. A break may also be political: Raxaul grew on the Bihar–Nepal border, where the boundary itself forces a change.
11.4.2 Minerals, Agriculture and Industry
A mineral deposit pulls people to a spot that might otherwise stay empty. Coalfields raised the towns of Jharia and Raniganj; the discovery of oil gave rise to Digboi; and in recent decades copper built Khetri in the dry country of Rajasthan. The same happens abroad — Kalgoorlie grew in the Australian desert purely to work its gold.
Agriculture builds towns too. Most of India’s small towns are grain markets, where farmers sell their produce and buy their needs. When farm output feeds industry, a manufacturing town can follow — the sugarcane belt of Uttar Pradesh, for instance, raised sugar-mill towns such as Modinagar, Deoband and Shamli.
Industry and urban growth go hand in hand; one can hardly survive without the other. The Industrial Revolution, which began in England in the late eighteenth century, quickened urban growth there, and in India the same link was felt strongly after Independence. Industry both creates new towns and enlarges old ones: Jamshedpur grew where a steel plant was raised on empty ground, while oil refineries have given rise to towns such as Numaligarh and Bongaigaon.
11.4.3 Religion, Education, Administration and Defence
Many of India’s oldest towns began as places of worship. Pilgrims came in growing numbers; roads and railways were built to reach the shrines; and other trades followed the crowds, until the religious town became a many-sided city. Haridwar, Puri, Rameshwaram, Dwarka, Amritsar and Ajmer all grew this way.
Learning has raised towns of its own. In ancient times Nalanda and Takshashila were centres of study famed far beyond India. In our own day Roorkee, Pilani and Aligarh grew mainly around their places of higher learning.
Political and administrative decisions matter greatly. National and state capitals grow fast, well served by roads and railways because government needs them to be. Chandigarh was built from nothing as a planned capital for a divided Punjab, and is known as the ‘city beautiful’. Partition, too, redrew the map: Kandla was developed as an Indian port to replace Karachi, which had gone to Pakistan.
Defence shaped an earlier layer of towns. In the medieval period, rulers raised fortified towns for protection — Chittaurgarh, Jodhpur, Ranthambhore, Gwalior and Chanderi among them. Today the same role is played by cantonments, the settlements that house the armed forces.
11.4.4 Physical Controls: Relief and Climate
Behind all these human factors lies the physical stage, and it favours some places over others. Towns grow readily on level land — in plains and on plateaus — where building is easy and transport can spread. Hills and mountains discourage them, offering little flat ground and difficult movement.
This is why the great majority of India’s towns lie in the North Indian Plain and along the coastal plains, why the peninsular plateau carries a fair number, and why the high Himalaya has so few. Climate reinforces the pattern. Extremes — too hot, too cold, too wet or too dry — hold population back, while a moderate climate invites settlement. The snowbound heights of the Himalaya and the arid Thar desert both remain thinly towned.
Physical conditions, then, set out the broad canvas on which towns may grow; the human factors decide the exact spot upon it.
11.5 Urbanisation in India: Level and Pattern
Individual towns grow for the reasons just seen. Add them all together and you get a national trend — the slow shift of a whole society from the village to the town. This section measures that shift for India and asks where it has gone furthest.
11.5.1 The Meaning and Measure of Urbanisation
Urbanisation is the process by which a society changes from mainly rural to mainly urban. It has two sides at once: a rising number of people living in urban settlements, and a rising share of people working in non-agricultural jobs.
To measure how far the process has gone, geographers use the level of urbanisation — the percentage of the total population living in urban areas.
\[\text{Level of urbanisation (\%)} = \frac{\text{Urban population}}{\text{Total population}} \times 100\]
Here urban population is the number of people living in places the Census counts as urban, total population is everyone in the country, and the answer is a percentage. It is worth keeping the two ideas apart: urbanisation is the process of change, while the level of urbanisation is the state reached at one moment.
11.5.2 India’s Level of Urbanisation
By the 2011 Census, a little under a third of India’s people lived in towns and cities. Working the figure out shows exactly how rural the country still is.
So barely one Indian in three lived in a town or city in 2011; nearly seven in ten were still rural. By world standards this is low — around half the world’s people were already urban by then. India is urbanising, but from a heavily rural base.
The climb to this point was slow and uneven. In 1901 only 10.84 per cent of Indians were urban; the share then rose, decade by decade, to 31.16 per cent in 2011. Fig. 11.5-1 shows the rise.
Graph
Fig. 11.5-1 Caption: The percentage of India’s population living in urban areas, 1901 to 2011. Brief: Vertical bar graph. X-axis: census years 1901, 1911, 1921, 1931, 1941, 1951, 1961, 1971, 1981, 1991, 2001, 2011. Y-axis: percentage of population urban (0 to 35). Bar heights, in order: 10.84, 10.29, 11.18, 11.99, 13.86, 17.29, 17.97, 19.91, 23.34, 25.72, 27.81, 31.16. Mark the single fall, from 1901 to 1911. Source: Census of India (1901–2011).
The rise falls into three phases. Growth was slow before 1931, when droughts, floods, famines and epidemics kept mortality high and towns from growing. Growth was medium from 1931 to 1961, when the urban population more than doubled, spurred by Independence, new industrial and capital towns, and the upheaval of Partition. Growth has been rapid since 1961, when the urban population rose more than four-fold and the number of towns climbed from 2,657 to 7,935.
11.5.3 The Spatial Pattern Across States
India’s urbanisation is spread very unevenly. Some states are nearly half urban; others are barely a tenth. Table 11.3 sets a few of them beside the national figure.
At the top of the table stands Goa, about 62 per cent urban, followed by the industrial and coastal states — Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Maharashtra and Gujarat — all well above the national 31 per cent. At the bottom, Himachal Pradesh and Bihar remain nine-tenths rural. The union territories are more urban still, Delhi being almost entirely so, at about 97.5 per cent.
The main reason for the spread is the level of economic development. Where manufacturing, trade and services concentrate, towns multiply and the urban share rises; states that still depend mainly on farming, with little industry, stay rural. Physical setting and history add to the pattern, but development does most of the work. Map 11.1 shows how the shares fall across the country.
Map
Map 11.1 Caption: The level of urbanisation across India, by state, 2011. Brief: Choropleth map of India showing each state and union territory shaded by its urban share of population in 2011, in graded classes (for example 10–20%, 20–30%, 30–40%, 40–50%, 50% and above), with a clear key. Label the most and least urbanised states. Show the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh; all boundaries as officially recognised by the Government of India. Do not mark any area as disputed.
11.6 The Problems and Advantages of Urban Growth
When cities grow faster than they can be planned, the growth brings costs as well as gains. This section sets out the main problems of rapid urban growth in India, and then the advantages that make cities worth having at all.
11.6.1 Slums and Squatter Settlements
When a city’s population grows faster than its housing, the shortfall shows up as slums and squatter settlements. A slum is a residential area of substandard, overcrowded housing, with poor ventilation and few or no basic sanitary facilities — the terms in which the Slum Areas Act of 1956 first defined it. A squatter settlement is one built on land the occupants have no legal right to, put up without official permission.
The two differ in stability and place. Slums are relatively more settled and lie in the older, inner parts of cities, where cheap housing has stood for years. Squatter settlements are more temporary and scatter across the city, especially the outer zones where the built-up area meets its rural edge.
They grow for a plain reason. Rapid, unplanned expansion draws in migrants faster than the city can build homes or lay water and sewer lines. Newcomers are often poor and cannot afford formal housing, so they crowd into whatever shelter they can find or build. The result is a real hazard to health — to the residents above all — because safe water and sanitation are exactly what such housing lacks.
As reported in the 2011 Census, about one urban household in six lived in a slum. This is not a small pocket of the city but a large share of its people, living without services that the rest of the city takes for granted.
11.6.2 Congestion, Sprawl and Overstretched Services
Traffic congestion grows with the city, and usually faster. As a city spreads, even people living inside it must travel across it, and the number of vehicles rises faster than the length or quality of the roads. The jams are worst in the Central Business District (CBD) — the commercial core, where activity and land values peak — and at the rush hours, when everyone travels at once and vehicles crawl.
Urban sprawl, met earlier as a form of outward growth, is also a cost. It consumes the farmland around the city, shrinking the land left for agriculture, and it stretches water, power and roads across an ever-wider ring that is expensive to serve.
Growth also outruns jobs. Migrants often arrive faster than work appears; many come without the skills the urban labour market rewards, and automation has cut the number of low-skill jobs, so under-employment builds up. Basic services feel the same strain — water, sanitation, power, health and schooling struggle to keep pace, and a substantial share of big-city residents live in poverty despite the wealth around them.
A well-planned city can carry a large population comfortably; the trouble comes when growth arrives before the plan. Much of India’s recent urban expansion has drawn in people faster than towns could serve them, and it is this gap — not size alone — that produces the problems above.
11.6.3 Urban Pollution
Cities concentrate people and industry, and so they concentrate pollution. In the air, the main sources are industry, transport and domestic emissions; in many large cities the suspended particulate matter — the fine solid particles that hang in the air — runs well above the safe limit.
Water suffers as much. Cities dump sewage and industrial waste into the rivers that pass them, and a large share of urban sewage is released untreated, leaving the river downstream unfit even for bathing. India’s most polluted major rivers, the Ganga and the Yamuna among them, carry the load of the cities strung along their banks. Many river basins have been affected by untreated city sewage.
Sound is a pollutant too. Noise pollution is the discomfort caused to people by unwanted, high-intensity sound, measured in decibels, a unit of loudness. Its sources are everyday city life — traffic, machinery, construction and loudspeakers — and in most large Indian cities the noise runs well above the 60–70 decibel range that is considered comfortable.
On land, the city’s own waste is the problem. Municipal and industrial solid waste piles up faster than it can be cleared, and where it is dumped untreated it fouls soil and groundwater and breeds disease.
11.6.4 The Advantages of Urban Growth
Cities are not only a list of problems, or people would not keep coming to them. The pull is real, and it rests on genuine advantages.
The first is the economy of packing people and firms close together. Shared roads, power lines and water systems cost less per person when they serve many; and the crowd of firms lets each specialise in what it does best. This is why so much of a country’s output comes from its cities.
The second is work. A city offers more jobs, and a far wider range of them, than any village — in industry, trade, transport and services — and usually at higher pay. The third is access to services: schools, colleges, hospitals, piped water and electricity are cheaper to deliver to people living close together than to households scattered across the countryside, so a well-run city can serve its people better.
The fourth is exchange. Bringing many people and skills together sparks new industries, new ideas and new ways of living; cities are where much of a society’s invention and culture is made. And a city is a great market — the place that gives farmers and rural craftworkers somewhere to sell. The question, then, is not whether to have cities, but how to plan them so these gains reach everyone and the costs fall on no single group.
11.7 Summary
What separates a town from a village is not size but what people do: town-dwellers work mainly in secondary and tertiary jobs, villagers in primary ones. The change is gradual — the rural–urban continuum — with no sharp line between the two.
Urban places are judged on five kinds of criteria — demographic, economic, social, morphological and functional — and no single one is decisive.
The Census of India treats a place as urban by two routes: it has an urban local government, or it passes three measured tests together — at least 5,000 people, at least 75% of male workers in non-farm jobs, and a density of at least 400 persons per km².
Statutory towns have an urban local body; census towns are still run as villages but pass the three tests. Census towns nearly trebled between 2001 and 2011, so much of India’s recent urban growth happened without any place being declared a town.
The Census sorts all urban places into six size classes. Class I places (1,00,000 and above) are called cities, and most urban Indians live in them.
A metropolitan (million-plus) city has 10 lakh people or more; a megacity has one crore or more. India had 53 metropolitan cities in 2011, three of them megacities.
An urban agglomeration captures the real, continuous city beyond its municipal line — a town with its outgrowths, or several joined towns. It needs a statutory town and at least 20,000 people, and it cannot cross a state boundary.
Urban sprawl spreads a city outward: ribbon settlement forms along the radiating roads, and infill fills the gaps between. Where the widening suburbs of neighbouring cities merge along a shared corridor, the belt is a conurbation — as along the Hugli in West Bengal.
A town grows where some factor concentrates people. Transport is the oldest such factor: towns rose first on water routes, then rail, then road, and very often at a break of bulk, where one mode of carriage gives way to another.
Minerals, farm markets and industry raise towns, and so do religion, learning, administration and defence. Physical conditions set the stage — level land and a moderate climate favour towns — while human factors fix the exact spot.
Urbanisation is the shift from a rural to an urban society, measured as the urban share of the population. India was 31.16% urban in 2011 — low by world standards, with seven in ten Indians still rural.
India’s urban share rose slowly before 1931, at medium pace to 1961, and rapidly since. The figure itself depends on the definition used, as the 1961 declassification of towns showed. Urbanisation is very uneven across states, driven mainly by economic development.
Rapid, unplanned growth outruns housing and services, producing slums and squatter settlements, traffic congestion, and air, water, noise and land pollution. Yet cities also bring real gains — cheaper services for people packed close, more and varied jobs, markets for rural producers, and the exchange of ideas. The problems come less from size than from growth arriving ahead of the plan.
Flowchart
Fig. 11.7-1 Caption: The making and growth of an urban place, from the census line to the costs and gains of growth. Nodes: a settlement crosses the urban line — 5,000 people, 75% of male workers in non-farm jobs, 400 persons per km² → counted urban as a statutory town (with an urban local body) or a census town (meeting the test only) → placed on the six-class size ladder — Class I and above are cities, million-plus are metropolitan, ten-million-plus are megacities → the town grows where a factor concentrates people — a transport break, mineral, market, industry, shrine or seat of power — on level land and a mild climate → it spreads outward: ribbon settlement → infill → sprawl → neighbouring towns coalesce into a conurbation → summed across the country, all towns give the level of urbanisation, 31.16% in India in 2011 and uneven across states → growth ahead of planning brings costs (slums, congestion, pollution) alongside real gains (jobs, services, markets, exchange)
What This Chapter Cannot Tell You
A national or state urban share is an average, and averages hide what lies inside them — a highly urbanised state still holds rural districts, and a rural state has its cities. The census is taken only once a decade, so its figures smooth over everything that happens between counts. And the urban–rural line is itself a rule, not a fact of the land: change the definition, and the numbers move even when nothing on the ground has.
11.8 Key Terms
break of bulk — a point where one mode of transport ends and another begins, so goods must be transferred; towns often grow at such points.
census town — a place still governed as a village but counted as urban because it meets the Census tests of population, non-farm work and density.
Central Business District (CBD) — the commercial core of a city, where activity and land values are highest and congestion is worst.
city — an urban place of one lakh (1,00,000) people or more; a Class I town.
conurbation — a continuous urban belt formed when several once-separate cities grow together along a shared corridor.
infill — the building-over of the open land left between ribbon settlements as a city sprawls outward.
level of urbanisation — the percentage of a country’s total population living in urban areas.
megacity — a city of ten million (one crore) people or more.
metropolitan city — an urban agglomeration or city of one million (10 lakh) people or more; a million-plus city.
noise pollution — the discomfort caused to people by unwanted, high-intensity sound, measured in decibels.
outgrowth — a built-up unit just outside a town’s statutory limit but physically joined to it, such as a railway colony or a campus.
ribbon settlement — a thin line of built-up development strung along a road radiating out from a town.
rural–urban continuum — the idea that rural and urban are the two ends of a single gradient, with no sharp line between them.
satellite town — a smaller town that grows in the orbit of a large city, depending on it for work while easing its crowding.
slum — a residential area of substandard, overcrowded housing with poor ventilation and few basic sanitary facilities.
squatter settlement — a settlement built without legal right or official permission on land the occupants do not own.
statutory town — an urban place defined as urban by law, with an urban local government such as a municipality or corporation.
transhipment — the transfer of goods from one mode of transport to another at a break of bulk.
urban agglomeration — a continuous built-up urban unit made of a town with its outgrowths, or of two or more joined towns.
urban sprawl — the outward areal spread of a city onto the land around it as it grows.
urbanisation — the process by which a society changes from mainly rural to mainly urban.
11.9 Points to Ponder
If a village becomes a census town — urban by the Census’s test — while its people still call it a village and it is still run by a panchayat, has it truly become a town, or only on paper? What would you count as the real change?
In some decades India’s urban share moved because the definition of a town changed, not because anyone migrated. Can a country become more or less urban without a single person changing where they live — and if so, what is the figure really measuring?
A town that grew at a break in transport thrives only as long as the break lasts. If a new tunnel or railway lets goods pass straight through, is the town’s location still an advantage, or has geography turned against it?
Every hectare a city sprawls onto was once farmland that fed people. When a city grows outward, is it creating value or destroying it — and can both be true at the same time?
The chapter argues that most urban problems come not from size but from growth arriving ahead of the plan. If that is so, is a large, well-planned city a better place to live than a small, unplanned one — and how would you tell?
Most of India’s urban population is gathered in a handful of the largest cities, while thousands of small towns hold few people. Is a country better served by a few great cities or by many small ones, and what would each choice cost the people in it?
11.10 Objective Questions
- The minimum population a place must have to pass the Census test for an urban area is: [1 mark]
- 2,000
- 5,000
- 10,000
- 20,000
- A place still governed by a village panchayat but counted as urban because it meets the Census tests is called a: [1 mark]
- statutory town
- census town
- cantonment
- municipality
- The Census of India calls an urban place a ‘city’ when its population reaches: [1 mark]
- 10,000
- 20,000
- 50,000
- 1,00,000
- The minimum total population required for an urban agglomeration (2011) is: [1 mark]
- 5,000
- 10,000
- 20,000
- 1,00,000
- The term ‘conurbation’ was coined by: [1 mark]
- C. H. Cooley
- Patrick Geddes
- Friedrich Ratzel
- Walter Christaller
- Assertion (A): The number of census towns nearly trebled between 2001 and 2011. [1 mark] Reason (R): Many settlements crossed the Census’s population, non-farm-work and density thresholds without being given an urban local government.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true, but R is false.
- A is false, but R is true.
- Assertion (A): Very few large towns are found in the high Himalaya. [1 mark] Reason (R): Level land and a moderate climate favour the growth of towns.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true, but R is false.
- A is false, but R is true.
- Match each item in Column A with the correct entry in Column B: [4 marks]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Ribbon settlement | i. A railway colony joined to a town |
| b. Outgrowth | ii. A point where transport modes change |
| c. Hugli belt | iii. A built-up strip along a road |
| d. Break of bulk | iv. A conurbation |
Fill in the blank: According to the 2011 Census, ______ per cent of India’s population lived in urban areas. [1 mark]
State whether true or false: A conurbation is a single city that has spread outward from one centre. [1 mark]
11.11 Check Your Concepts
State the three conditions the Census of India applies to treat a place without an urban local body as urban. [2 marks]
Define a conurbation and give one Indian example. [2 marks]
What is urbanisation? Name its two components. [2 marks]
Differentiate between a statutory town and a census town. [3 marks]
Differentiate between a metropolitan city and a megacity, stating the population mark of each. [3 marks]
Give reasons why the high Himalaya and the Thar desert have few towns. [3 marks]
Explain, with the help of an example, how a break in transport gives rise to a town. [4 marks]
‘India is urbanising, but from a heavily rural base.’ Evaluate this claim, using the 2011 urban figure. [4 marks]
Describe the main problems that result from the rapid, unplanned growth of large cities in India, together with their causes and consequences. [6 marks]
Discuss the factors that influence the location and growth of urban centres in India, using Indian examples. [6 marks]
11.12 Map, Diagram & Data Interpretation
Study Fig. 11.1-1, the flowchart of how the Census decides whether a place is urban. (a) State which route a place with a municipal corporation takes. (b) List the three conditions a place without an urban local body must meet. [3 marks]
Table 11.3 gives the urban share of selected states in 2011. (a) Name the most and the least urbanised states shown. (b) By how many percentage points does Goa’s urban share exceed the all-India figure? (c) State one thing this table cannot tell you about where urban people live within a state. [4 marks]
A country has a total population of 50 million, of whom 12 million live in urban areas. Using the chapter’s formula, calculate its level of urbanisation, showing your working. [3 marks]
Study Fig. 11.5-1, the percentage of India’s population that is urban from 1901 to 2011. (a) In which decade did the urban share fall, and what caused the fall? (b) State one thing a rising bar does not tell you about urban life. [3 marks]
Look at Fig. 11.3-1, showing ribbon settlement and infill. Describe the two stages in your own words, and explain how the pattern in the second stage can, in time, lead to a conurbation. [4 marks]