Abstract
Urban transformation in India is less about moving people, that is to say rural-urban migration, than about morphing places, or the change in the economic structure of existing settlements, many of which continue to be governed as rural areas. From 2001 to 2011, of the 90 million people newly classified as part of the urban population, approximately 40 million were added through natural growth, 20 million by migration and the remaining 30 million were a result of this phenomenon of morphing places, in particular the creation of new Census towns. This chapter asks whether administrative status matters in these small towns, in terms of access to basic services such as water and sanitation. It also looks at the rural neighbourhoods of these small towns and asks the same question. The first part of the inquiry indicated that, subject to the state level caveats, there might not be a major distinction between non-proximate Census towns, and towns with urban administrative status in India. Thus, there is little to distinguish villages that are proximate to Census towns from those proximate to statutory towns.
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Notes
- 1.
In India, the local body governance structure is separated into rural and urban classifications, each with its own potential functional domain as defined by the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution of India. The decision to declare a particular settlement (or group of settlements) as urban is taken by the respective state governments, based on state-specific legislation. See Joshi et al. (2016) for details.
- 2.
The Silverman’s rule of thumb is 0.9 times the minimum of the standard deviation and the interquartile range divided by 1.34 times the sample size to the negative one-fifth power. The present kernel density estimation is unweighted, that is there are no observation weights.
- 3.
If the distributions cross at only one point, one of them stochastically dominates the other, that is there are proportionately more observations below all levels in one distribution as compared to another. In this case, while it is broadly true, it is not exactly so, as a closer inspection of the density plots indicates.
- 4.
There is a caveat to this. In rural areas, there has been a considerable investment subsidy for building toilets, earlier as part of the total sanitation campaign and now as part of the Swachh Bharat Mission. To some extent, the CTs could have benefited from this investment, and this characterization is misleading to that extent.
- 5.
In 2001, there is no separate identification of piped sewer and septic tank. We therefore use the indicator of households with access to ‘water closet (WC)’ as the corresponding indicator for 2001, compared to the sum of households with piped sewer and septic tank in 2011. According to the Census 2001 definition, “sanitary water flush latrines are those latrines that have water closets fitted with flushing cisterns. Such latrines that may be connected to a septic tank or an underground sewerage system are also recorded as water closet latrines”. This makes the sum of piped water septic tank latrines in 2011 comparable to water closets in 2001.
- 6.
This is because these are population weighted averages. A higher proportion of the population of statutory towns is in the larger towns and this leads to an overall higher average.
- 7.
The state dummies and state-statutory status interaction dummy for Maharashtra and Gujarat were not significant, except in the one case mentioned in the text.
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Mukhopadhyay, P. (2017). Does Administrative Status Matter for Small Towns in India?. In: Denis, E., Zérah, MH. (eds) Subaltern Urbanisation in India. Exploring Urban Change in South Asia. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3616-0_17
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