City-Size Distributions in a Quasi-Open Economy: The India Evidence

This chapter examines India’s urbanization and urban system. It shows that urbanization in India continues to be driven by natural increase and reclassification of rural settlements into urban, with rural-to-urban migration playing, at best, a modest role in the urbanization process. Recent economy-wide shifts including higher economic growth have made little impact on either the pace or the structure of urbanization, which continues to be dominated by a large number of small towns and a small number of large cities. India’s urban system displays neither primacy nor does it conform to the rank-size distribution. Upper-tail cities are not large enough to fit into the rank-size distribution and the populations of the lower end are smaller than the predicted values, raising questions about their capacity to generate scale and agglomeration economies. Marked variations are observed in urban systems across states. This chapter emphasizes the need for further research to help understand the urban systems of India’s federal structure.