Urbanisation: patterns, migration and city growth

The first principle

A place becomes urban when most of its people stop living off the land and live by trading goods, services and skills in a dense settlement. Cities grow because density makes people more productive, since firms find workers and ideas spread faster when people live close together, but the same density raises the price of land, water and movement. India's urban story, from slow growth after 1951 to information technology (IT) hubs and Tier 2 towns, follows that trade off.

The core

How the Census defines urban

• The Census of India counts two kinds of towns. A statutory town is any place with a municipal corporation, municipality, cantonment board or notified town area committee, so it is urban by law. A census town has no urban local body but meets three tests together: a population of at least 5,000, at least 75 per cent of male main workers engaged outside agriculture, and a density of at least 400 persons per square kilometre.
• An urban agglomeration is a continuous urban spread formed by a core town and its outgrowths, and in 2011 India had 53 urban agglomerations of a million or more people.
• Census towns jumped from 1,362 in 2001 to 3,894 in 2011, while statutory towns rose only from 3,799 to 4,041. Much of India's urbanisation is therefore happening in large villages that work like towns but are still run by gram panchayats, which scholars call hidden or subaltern urbanisation.

The trend since 1951

• The urban share rose slowly, from 17.3 per cent in 1951 to 31.1 per cent (377 million people) in 2011. The 2001 to 2011 decade was the first in which the absolute increase in urban population (about 91 million) exceeded the rural increase.
• Because the 2021 Census was postponed, later figures are estimates: the United Nations' World Urbanization Prospects (2018) put India at about 35 per cent urban in 2020, and the Technical Group on Population Projections (2020) projected about 39 per cent by 2036. The next Census, with a reference date of 1 March 2027, will give the first official count in sixteen years.

Where urban growth comes from

Urban population grows in three ways: natural increase among people already in cities, net migration from villages, and reclassification of villages into towns along with the stretching of city boundaries. Studies of the 2001 to 2011 decade find natural increase to be the largest component, the reclassification of villages into census towns close behind, and net rural to urban migration a smaller share. Migration matters, but it is not the main engine.

Why large cities draw more migrants than small towns

In developing countries migrants usually pass over the nearby small town and head for the metropolis, for reasons that reinforce one another.

• Expected income. Michael Todaro (1969), and then John Harris and Todaro (1970), argued that a migrant compares the rural wage with the expected urban wage, which is the city wage multiplied by the chance of getting a job. A big city's expected income stays higher even when unemployment is high, so migration continues and spills into the informal sector.
• Agglomeration economies. Large labour markets match workers to jobs better, specialised firms cluster, and skills are learnt on the job, so wages and productivity are higher than in small towns.
• Informal work as a foothold. Construction, domestic work, vending, loading and delivery absorb unskilled newcomers within days, which small towns cannot offer.
• Networks. Earlier migrants from the same district or community find rooms and jobs for the next ones, so streams such as Bihar to Delhi or Ganjam in Odisha to Surat become self sustaining.
• Amenities and freedom. Hospitals, colleges and an anonymity that loosens caste and gender control draw the young.
• Primacy and policy bias. Investment, offices and infrastructure gather in a few primate cities, a term Mark Jefferson (1939) used for a city several times larger than the next; starved small towns lack industry, finance and governance capacity to compete.

Dimensions

• Demographic. Male led migration leaves women and the elderly to run households in source villages of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha.
• Economic. Cities generate most non farm output, and remittances link urban and rural economies.
• Social. The city weakens caste and gender controls but creates new divisions of class and language.
• Regional. Urbanisation follows development, so the southern and western states are far more urban than the eastern and Himalayan states. Kerala's jump from 26 per cent in 2001 to 47.7 per cent in 2011 came mainly from new census towns, since its villages already have urban densities and non farm work.

In practice

Migration data

• Census 2011 counted about 455.8 million migrants by place of last residence, around 37 per cent of the population, but most were women who moved on marriage, while employment was the leading reason among men.
• The Economic Survey 2016 to 2017 used railway passenger data to estimate about 9 million interstate migrants a year between 2011 and 2016.
• In the suo motu migrant labourers case (In Re: Problems and Miseries of Migrant Labourers, 2021), the Supreme Court directed all states to implement One Nation One Ration Card and to register unorganised workers on the e Shram portal of the Ministry of Labour and Employment.

Tier 2 cities and the new middle class

There is no Census category called Tier 2. The common usage follows the Seventh Central Pay Commission's house rent allowance grouping, where X cities have 50 lakh or more people and Y cities have 5 lakh to 50 lakh; Tier 2 broadly means Y cities such as Indore, Jaipur, Lucknow, Surat, Coimbatore, Kochi and Bhubaneswar. They grow because land and wages are cheaper, regional airports under the Ude Desh ka Aam Nagrik (UDAN) scheme (2016) and highways have cut distances, and remote work spread after the pandemic.

Their growth is tied to a new middle class whose identity rests on consumption. Leela Fernandes (2006) described India's post liberalisation middle class as defined less by occupation than by lifestyle and the goods it buys. In Tier 2 cities this shows as malls and multiplexes, branded clothes and cars, English medium schooling as aspiration, lavish weddings as display, and purchases on equated monthly instalments (EMIs), while Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payments and online retail have closed the gap with the metros. Consumption here is a claim to status and modernity, a culture and not just higher spending. Middle class demand in turn creates retail and service jobs that enlarge the class further, though much of it lives precariously on credit and contract work.

IT hubs: new avenues and new problems

Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, Noida and Gurugram grew as IT hubs after the 1990s.

• New avenues. The IT and business process management sector employs about 5.4 million people directly, and each job supports several more in transport, security, catering and housing. It created a salaried, mobile middle class, drew many women into formal work and seeded start ups.
• Inequality and a dual city. Highly paid professionals live beside low paid service workers in slums and urban villages, and Carol Upadhya (2016) showed how IT work produces sharp new class divisions.
• Land and gentrification. Rising land prices push out older residents and absorb peripheral farmland; the urban villages of Gurugram turned into rental colonies for migrants.
• Infrastructure stress. Bengaluru's traffic, its 2024 water shortage and its polluted Bellandur lake show growth outrunning planning.
• Gated enclaves. Private townships give elites their own water, power and security, so they withdraw from public services and civic politics.
• Gender and caste. Women gain income and autonomy but face night shift safety concerns, while recruitment through English and engineering degrees favours urban upper castes.
• Migrants and identity. Language assertion against outsiders recurs in Bengaluru, and in August 2012 rumours triggered an exodus of people from the north east. The Bezbaruah Committee (Ministry of Home Affairs, 2014), set up after the death of Nido Taniam in Delhi, recommended a special police unit, fast track courts and awareness of north eastern cultures.

Issues and way forward

• Urbanisation is undercounted. Census towns stay under gram panchayats, so they lack drainage, planning and municipal staff. States should convert qualifying census towns into urban local bodies, so that urban growth is governed as urban.
• Migrants remain invisible. Benefits tied to the home state and lack of address proof exclude them; the Working Group on Migration (Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, 2017) recommended portable entitlements, and e Shram and rental housing help.
• Over concentration in metros. Investment bias toward primate cities is countered by building Tier 2 and small town capacity, which NITI Aayog's report on urban planning capacity (2021) linked to more trained planners and updated master plans.
• Growth outrunning planning in IT hubs. Metropolitan Planning Committees under Article 243ZE are rarely functional, and the Second Administrative Reforms Commission (2007) recommended empowering them to plan transport, water and land across municipal boundaries.

Common confusions

• Statutory town and census town. A statutory town is urban by law; a census town is urban by its characteristics but is still governed as a village.
• Urbanisation and urban growth. Urbanisation is a rising share of people in towns; urban growth is a rise in their number.
• Migration and urbanisation. Most migrants in India are rural to rural or women moving on marriage, and natural increase adds more to cities than migration does.

For the exam

• Keyword bank: statutory town, census town, subaltern urbanisation, reclassification, expected income, agglomeration economies, primate city, Tier 2, new middle class, culture of consumption, gentrification, gated enclave, dual city.
• Previous year questions: Practise the previous year questions on this topic →
• Use in an answer:
  • Introduction (data): India was 31.1 per cent urban in 2011, and that decade was the first in which towns added more people than villages did.
  • Introduction (scholar): Michael Todaro explained that migrants move for expected, not actual, urban income, which is why metropolises keep drawing people despite high unemployment.
  • Conclusion: Cities are India's engines of growth, but they will stay engines only if small towns, migrants and the urban poor are planned for as carefully as IT parks and malls.
  • Conclusion: Balanced urbanisation means spreading jobs and services to Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns so that migrating to a metropolis becomes a choice rather than a compulsion.