Maharashtra has the most city dwellers in India

Maharashtra’s urban population grew by around 97 lakh in the last decade, taking its number of city dwellers to 5.08 crore, the highest for any state in the country, reveal provisional figures of Census 2011, released on Monday. In terms of urbanization however, it ranks third among major states. Of Maharashtra’s 11.23 crore population, 45.23% live in urban areas now, up from 42.43% in 2001, said Ranjit Singh Deol, director, Census operations, Maharashtra. This, though, is behind Tamil Nadu and Kerala, where the share of the urban population is 48.45% and 47.72%, respectively. P Arokiasamy of the International Institute for Population Sciences in Govandi said Maharashtra’s development was not surprising given that it has some of India’s most concentrated urban centres like Mumbai and Thane.Suburbs powering urban growth Mumbai: Most of Maharashtra’s urbanization is driven by Mumbai, Thane, Pune, Nagpur and Nashik. Mumbai’s suburban district alone houses 93.32 lakh people, Thane another 85 lakh and Pune 57 lakh more. These places stand in stark contrast to Gadchiroli, Sindhudurg and Hingoli, which are the least urbanized districts in the state. Within cities like Mumbai, it is the suburban areas that are powering the urban growth. “Mumbai’s growth percentage is nothing in comparison to those of tiertwo cities. Take, for instance, Thane which registered 35.94% urban growth or Pune which clocked 30.34% growth in the last decade,” explained Arokiasamy. He added that Tamil Nadu always leads in terms of urbanization because it has notified many villages as town panchayats. In earlier censuses, Kerala used to have the lowest urban rate because it had classified many small towns as villages. Director of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences S Parasuraman called the increasing sprawl in the state a “natural process of development” where people quit agriculture in search of jobs. Census officials echoed the thought, arguing that urbanization is a welcome demographic transition. They pointed out that “economics growth influences urbanization, which in turn affects the rate of economic growth”. Currently, of Maharashtra’s city dwellers, 2.67 crore are men and 2.4 crore women. This is an increase of 21.99% and 25.58%, respectively, since 2001. Some social experts said the urban growth might be an inevitable development, but for it to be sustainable the state needs to tailor its policies. Prof Parasuraman argued that “we displace people from rural areas, but don’t let them settle in urban areas”, as is seen by the large numbers living in our cities in hopelessness and poverty without proper housing, sanitation or other basic facilities. “Our policies need to be reworked to be able to absorb the urban growth,” he said. According to the Census’ definition, an urban area includes all statutory towns (with a municipality, corporation), Cantonment Board or notified town area committee, etc. as declared by state law. Towns, meanwhile, are places that have a minimum population of 5,000, at least 75% of male working population engaged in nonagricultural sectors and a density of population of at least 400 persons per sq km.