ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the process of demographic and economic growth and the quality of the micro-environment in and around the city of Delhi, focusing on the differences between the core and periphery, based on both secondary as well as primary data. The specific question raised is whether there is a process of socio-economic segmentation, resulting in disparity in terms of access to basic amenities and physical quality of living wherein the environmental costs fall unevenly on the rich and poor and on the people living in the core and periphery. The larger objective is to see if an environmental transition in the context of urban India can be meaningfully analysed within the framework of shifting of costs from ‘core’ to ‘periphery’ wherein the two concepts have socio-political connotations and are not defined simply in terms of geographical location.
