ABSTRACT
Worldwide, poverty, social inequality and environmental degradation are increasingly urban phenomena, concentrated in developing cities and especially in South Asia. In India, urbanisation is fast becoming one of the country’s greatest development challenges. India, together with China, contains more than a third of the total global population, and the speed and scale of urbanisation in India is globally unprecedented. By 2030, about 40.7 per cent of the total population, or some 590 million people, will live in Indian cities; this is a low estimate because the term ‘urban’ is used rigidly in Indian policy, fully excluding peri-urban areas (State of the World Population 2007). Even so, the growth of the urban population has been exponential, from 78 million in 1961 to 286 million in 2001, with the projection that this will double in 25 years (MHUPA 2011: 14). By 2050, India’s urban population is expected to be more than 875 million, as compared to some 379 million people in 2010 (Nandi and Gamkhar 2013). Notably, it is the size of medium to large size cities such as Jaipur, Amdavad (formerly Ahmedabad), Lucknow and Pune that are expected to experience the fastest growth as the sizes of many major metropolitan cities like Kolkata actually decrease due to outward migration to the smaller cities.
