Characteristics of recent urbanisation in India in light of the divergent development paths of metropolises (original) (raw)

The number of cities, according to the size and proportion of urban population, is further increased by the so-called census towns that are registered among the urban settlements only for the manipulation of the pace of urbanisation, sometimes by a plastically interpreted urban definition, in the absence of real central functions and self-governments. In this definition, all settlements with more than 5,000 inhabitants-in reality, many settlements with fewer population-are considered as towns if they meet the following criteria: at least 75% of their full-time male employees work in the secondary or tertiary sector and the population density is at least 400 persons/km 2. The group of census towns is newly designated before each census in accordance with this set of criteria, and the size of the urban population is defined taking this aspect into consideration. The number of census towns at the time of the 2011 census was 3,894, as opposed to 1,362 a decade earlier, while that of functional towns increased from 3,799 to 4,041 (Singh 2014), which means a more than one-and-a-half-fold growth in the number of urban settlements, from 5,161 to 7,935. According to our computation, a strong (Pearson method) correlation (r=+0.89) exists between the change in the number of census towns Urban population 30% or below Urban population over 30%