ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to analyse the patterns of urbanisation and development that have obtained in India in the early nineties. In the nineties with the official initiation of liberalized policies this pattern has become associated with the spatial dynamics of international capital and made unevenness a premise for capital accumulation. The spatial pattern of urbanisation and development in 1991 reinforces the very process of centralisation and metropolitan hegemony despite agricultural improvement in some districts of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil nadu and Andhra Pradesh. In 1981, the spatial pattern of urbanisation was of a few dominant cities followed by a large number of sub-regional and smaller centres and a vast impoverished periphery. Industrial growth and the related urbanisation process are found to have a very limited spatial expansion as shown by the very high factor scores of a few large urban centres. A new trend of a symbiosis of agricultural surplus and urban growth in a number of states, besides Punjab.
