The substantial share of small towns in India’s system of cities

Abstract

Understanding Indian urbanisation is challenging. Despite a slight trend of metropolisation, small towns with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants are still home to one-third of the Indian urban population and its demographic growth. Making sense of this trend and precisely qualifying their demographic contribution to the dynamics of the Indian city system is the aim of this chapter. We have built and exploited a harmonised database comprising all the Indian cities which allows us to compare their evolution, whatever their size and the state they belong to, over the last 50 years. It highlights that small towns’ dynamics since 1961 do not differ from those of larger cities. All the cities in the system have the same growth opportunities regardless of their size. A very dynamic demographic evolution distinguishes a group of small towns whose growth is generally independent of their distance from the nearest million plus cities. An important number of the most dynamic small towns remain governed by the rules and provisions of rural administration, thus questioning the governance of urban transformations.