Answer:

♤ Between the two censuses of 2001 and 2011, India’s urban population grew by 33

per cent.

♤ During this period, the combined population growth of India’s six largest urban centres (metro cities), was quite close to the overall population growth of India. Thus the growth in these urban centers was not the main reason for this urban growth. It wasn’t even the growth in the population of smaller towns and the booming state capitals that drove this urbanisation.

♤ It was a dramatic 54 per cent increase in the number of habitations called urban - almost all of this increase came from a tripling of the number of “census towns”, rising from around 1300 to 3900.

♤ This urban classification of ‘census towns’, which exists on census paper only, helps differentiate between India’s smaller farming communities and the larger market town-type settlements that are experiencing rapid and haphazard growth.

♤ To become a census town, a village must fulfil three criteria—

o it needs at least 5,000 inhabitants,

o a density of 400 people per sq. km, and,

o at least three quarters of its male working population must be “engaged in non- agricultural pursuits”.

♤ Simply put, census towns are populous places where farming is no longer viable and people have turned to other professions.

♤ Census towns are poised on the threshold of the rural-urban divide. Semi-urban though they might feel, census towns are still run by panchayats and classified as rural for all official purposes, allowing them to draw on Union government development schemes and exempting them from property taxes.

♤ Studies show that there is a sharp drop in male employment in agriculture over the last few years. This is mainly due to the available machine inputs for agriculture and also due to creation of better job opportunities in manufacturing and service sectors

♤ Due to factors like lower real estate prices in rural India, improving education facilities and improving infrastructure like roads, electricity etc, over 75 per cent of new factories during the last decade came up in rural India. Manufacturing in rural India is now 55 per cent of India's manufacturing GDP. Growth in services is equally robust in rural India.

♤ Thus we can see census towns as a growing number of village clusters coming together to create viable production and consumption units.