As per the Population Census of India 2011, there were 7,933 individual cities and towns in India. This included 4041 statutory towns and 3,892 census towns. There were 474 urban agglomerations (UAs) and 981 outgrowths. If urban agglomeration is taken as a unit, there were 6,173 cities/towns and UAs in India. Based on the size of the population, the Census of India groups cities and towns into six size classes from Class I to Class VI. The urban areas which have a population above one 100,000 (100,000) are termed as cities while those which have a population less than one 100,000 are termed as towns.
The analyses on size-class distribution have been carried out taking UAs and cities/towns as opposed to individual towns and cities as a unit. Therefore, in this chapter, the urban frame constitutes 6,173 UAs and cities/towns instead of 7,933 individual cities and towns. Class I cities have a population above 100,000 (0.1 million). Towns are the sum of Class II, Class III, Class IV, Class V and Class VI towns, i.e. all those urban centres with a population of less than 100,000.
While there was an increasing concentration of urban population living in the metropolitan UAs/cities of India in the decade 2001–11 the proportion of urban population in non-metropolitan India and towns of India declined during the same decade (Table 4). The percentage share of population in metropolitan cities increased from 37.8 to 42.3 per cent in 2001–11.
Urbanisation in India is top heavy with 70.19 per cent population living in Class I UAs/towns in 2011. The main reason for a higher concentration of urban population in Class I UAs/towns is the real expansion of these UAs/towns due to the addition of new census towns and expansion of municipal boundaries. The pattern of population distribution across size-classes remained the same over the Census years with a decline in the proportional share of population in all size-classes except Class I. The 2011 Population Census shows a slight reversal of this trend in Class V and Class VI towns. These classes reported an increment in their proportional share of urban population. This is again due to the emergence of new census towns in these size-classes.
Components of Urban Growth:
There are four main components of urban growth in India, namely: a) natural increase, b) net rural-urban migration i.e. difference of rural-urban and urban-rural migration, c) net rural-urban reclassification i.e. reclassification of villages in towns and declassification of towns in villages, and d) jurisdictional changes or changes in municipal boundaries. In the present study, the last two components are merged together. It has been discussed in studies (Visaria, 1997; Bhagat and Mohanty, 2009; Bhagat, 2012) that natural increase, which was the most important component of urban growth in India, has lost its dominance since the 1970s with a corresponding increase in net rural-urban migration and net rural-urban reclassification which includes jurisdictional changes and outgrowths. During 2001–11, net rural-urban reclassification including jurisdictional changes emerged as the most important factor in urban growth, because of the unprecedented increment in the number of census towns.