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In this article we will discuss about the nature of urbanization in India.
India is not an exception to the world-wide trend of mass exodus of people from rural areas and their settlement in urban centres. In India the rural-urban migration began during the thirties of the twentieth century. The pace of such migration increased manifold during the post-independence period.
There is an increasing concentration of people in small, medium and large-sized towns, leading to a spatial expansion of the urban settlements. In addition, new towns centering around the setting up of new factories are coming up in increasing numbers.
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Sociologists have explained the global trend towards rural-urban migration in different ways. The explanatory causes may be classed under two categories: the push factor and the pull factor. In some cases the situation in the countryside may be so inhospitable as to force people to leave their hearth and home. Sociologists characterize such factors as ‘push’ factors.
The people living in the countryside may also be attracted by better opportunities of employment and good living (these may also be fancied rather than real) in urban areas and decide to move out. Sociologists characterize such factors as ‘pull factors’.
It is difficult to say for certain which of these factors plays a more decisive role in rural-urban migration. On the contrary, it is more probable that both the factors are responsible for influencing the decision of the people to migrate.
We may enumerate briefly the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors which are operative in the Indian situation. Among the ‘push’ factors the following are particularly important.
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To begin with, man-land ratio in the countryside has changed to the disadvantage of the farmers, so that the arable land available to them has diminished considerably. This has severely restricted the scope for expansion of employment opportunities and created scarcity in food supply.
Secondly, the rate of increase of public investment in the countryside has not kept pace with the rate of increase of population. This has further aggravated the problem of food scarcity and restriction in employment opportunities.
Thirdly, expansion of primary education in the countryside, paradoxically enough, has not produced, in many cases, the desired result of benefiting th6 community and the persons who are so educated.
In traditional societies, including India, literacy is a status symbol. As such, to make a person literate has the effect of alienating him from his ancestral occupation, because literacy tends to give him the impression that manual work or farming operations are not proper calling of a literate person.
They, therefore, migrate to urban areas in search of new ‘pastures’. Fourthly, farming in India provides seasonal employment. Naturally, those who are engaged in farming are forced to move to urban areas in search of odd jobs when there is not enough work in the field. In course of time, some of them stay on in the periphery of towns and cities.
Among the ‘pull’ factors, mention may be made of the following. In the first place, the comparative affluence and the existence of varied and numerous employment opportunities in towns and cities attract large numbers of people from the countryside.
Secondly, in the cities and towns there is heterogeneity, not simply in matters of employment, but also in patterns of recreation, in education, in modes of transportation, in styles of toughing and styles of thought as well as in kinds of stimulation. In contrast to life in the countryside which is dull, monotonous and uneventful, life in towns and cities attract people from the countryside.
Thirdly, the partition of the country on the eve of India’s independence led to a mass exodus of people from East Bengal and West Punjab. Millions of uprooted people without home and jobs, for obvious reasons, preferred to stay in towns and cities proper or in the peripheries in order to eke out a living.
They had no other alternative. As a consequence, the concentration of population in cities and towns all over India, West Bengal and Punjab towns in particular, swelled all on a sudden.
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Fourthly, it is pointed out that in India “family and village ties are sufficiently strong to create an obligation upon the successful migrant to help sponsor new entrants to the city”.
The cumulative effect of this has been that “it (the upswing in urban ward migration) has now progressed to a point where the residents of almost every village have relatives or fellow villagers in at least one (and possibly several) of the major cities”.
Western countries also experienced urbanization as a sequel to expansion and diversification of industries. But urbanization in these countries was entirely different in nature from that in India. As in India, people living in rural areas were attracted to cities and towns by the prospect of better employment opportunities and higher income. In most cases, their dreams were fulfilled.
They got jobs and were successful in increasing their income. Moreover, there were also opportunities of getting trained and acquiring necessary skills which helped them not only to make themselves employable but also to become competent and skilled factory hands. As a result, they could identify themselves completely with the urbanities and they no longer remained outsiders’.
In India the picture is just the opposite. The expectation with which the people flock in large numbers from rural areas to towns and cities remains unfulfilled in most of the cases. They fail to get jobs or to acquire the necessary skill to make themselves employable as factory hands.
They are, thus, forced to live in urban slums or in slums adjoining city areas. Physically, they might be living in cities and towns. But they do not belong to cities and towns in the sense that they do not share in the lives of city people. They do not have the necessary income to participate in various urban activities-recreational, educational and civic.
Their only goal is to earn some money and just stay alive. They have no means either to contribute to urban life of to benefit from urban amenities. Some sociologists have characterised such a situation as subsistence urbanization.
It is alarming to note that most of these people are unlikely to escape from the subsistence urbanization level of living even after a long period of stay in cities and towns. Commenting on this aspect of urbanization.
Gerald Breese makes some significant observations:
“The grossly low level of subsistence urbanization may be so close to an agricultural subsistence level of living that the difference may be just one of locale. This plight may be even more intolerable when it is daily compared with examples of the opposite extreme in level of living enjoyed by a lucky few”. (Italics ours)
The frustration which may be engendered by this kind of experience leads to alcoholism, delinquency, anti-social Activities of various kinds and sometimes angry protest movements.
Gerald Breese, therefore, observes:
“The prospects for the ordinary inhabitant of an urban area in a newly developing country is that things will be worse before they are better. A high degree of physical urbanization—in terms of where people live—is quite likely to be characterised by a low degree of social urbanization, in the sense of providing appropriate amenities for urban life”.
Thus, we see that the process of urbanization in India is far removed in, nature from the urbanization process in Western societies. Daniel Lerner has gone so far as to say that the urbanization that we see in India and in other developing” nations of Asia and Africa “bears more resemblance to the mass migrations of human hordes driven by famine and pestilence in the centuries preceding the modern epoch”.
Joel M. Halpern has characterised the incorporation of very large number of rural people into towns and cities without their being absorbed into the urban ways of life as “peasantization of cities”.
The dilemma faced by developing nations, including India, is cited by Kingsley Davis thus:
“If they do not substantially step up the exodus from rural areas, these areas will be swamped with underemployed farmers. If they do step up the exodus, the cities will grow at a disastrous rate”. There is little doubt that the latter trend is increasing in India at an alarmingly fast rate.