History Of Urbanization In India

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In earlier decades, urbanization in India was said to have a dual dimension. The first view was that the urbanization process is not unequal, but has a very stable distribution, whereas the second view, alleged that the distribution was ‘top-heavy’, with large size class towns and cities mainly driving the urbanization process, while the small and medium sized cities barely growing. Mohan etal. 1982, the advocates of the first view, showed that the idea of ‘top heavy urban structure’ in India is a misconception, and it is a manifestation of wrongful presentation of data analysis. According to the authors, we cannot compare two decades if the number of towns in the starting and ending year of a decade are different, for example, we are comparing…show more content…
This methodology shows no distortionary behavior in the distribution of urban population by size class. The results show that the largest size class cities grew faster than the smaller ones, but the differences were not starkly different and it was the Class V (<10000) size class category which registered the highest growth rate. These findings clearly rule out any possibility of a distortionary and uneven distribution and shows that the contribution of all size classes are roughly the same and hence the growth rate of different size class towns and cities have been balanced over decades. The paper also affirms that urban growth was mainly because of the existing towns, with the new towns contributing only marginally to the total urban population growth, which essentially means that reclassification had a negligible role in the urbanization…show more content…
The methodology followed by Kundu in obtaining the distribution of urban population by size class was to consider, the starting year of a decade as the base for town classification, for example, if the decade under study is 1971-81, then the 1971 town classification is considered as the basis and also ensuring that no declassified town gets eliminated from the analysis, for which they add up the total population of such towns to the ending year population. The findings affirm that the growth rate of population for the largest size classes remain higher than all other size class categories for the time period considered. According to Kundu, weak and unstable economic base of small and medium sized towns have played a major role in their unsatisfactory performance in the urbanization process. The plans and programs adopted to restore the economy of the small and medium sized class towns, have failed to do so. The policy prescriptions of Kundu, in this regard was to strengthen the economic foundation of the small and medium towns. Therefore, the two contradicting views on urbanization in India were largely driven by the methodology used. However, this paper does not talk about the correctness of the

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