In 2023, approximately a third of the total population in India lived in cities. The trend shows an increase of urbanization by more than 4 percent in the last decade, meaning people have moved away from rural areas to find work and make a living in the cities. Leaving the fieldOver the last decade, urbanization in India has increased by almost 4 percent, as more and more people leave the agricultural sector to find work in services. Agriculture plays a significant role in the Indian economy and it employs almost half of India’s workforce today, however, its contribution to India’s GDP has been decreasing while the services sector gained in importance. No rural exodus in sightWhile urbanization is increasing as more jobs in telecommunications and IT are created and the private sector gains in importance, India is not facing a shortage of agricultural workers or a mass exodus to the cities yet. India is a very densely populated country with vast areas of arable land – over 155 million hectares of land was cultivated land in India as of 2015, for example, and textiles, especially cotton, are still one of the major exports. So while a shift of the workforce focus is obviously taking place, India is not struggling to fulfill trade demands yet.

In 2022, India's urban population recorded a growth rate of two percent. The growth rate slowed down by 0.1 percent from the previous year's growth rate. The growth rate has been on a downward trend since 2020 after a period of stagnation between 2014 and 2018.

This data collection is comprised of interviews with Smart City stakeholders and actors across four Smart Cities in India as well as a set of interviews with national-level actors in Delhi. These interviews took place between September 2018 and October 2019 and are a reflection of the nationally-led Smart City Mission from 2015-2020. The cities represented include Jaipur, Bengaluru, Kochi, Indore, and Delhi.

This research has two primary aims. The first is to develop cutting edge, theoretically informed, insights into the nature of mobility governance reform and the potential to generate more sustainable urban mobility in India. The combined pressures of a growing urban population, increasing urban sprawl, and rapidly rising income, coupled with inadequate public transport, lack of coordinated infrastructure, and increased motorisation have placed huge and unequal burdens on India's urban areas. This has resulted in highly congested roads, poor air quality, high pedestrian casualty rates and poor accessibility and quality of life particularly for the urban poor. In this context, redesigning urban mobility governance has been identified as a critical element of progress in delivering more inclusive and economically, environmentally and socially sustainable cities in India (MoUD, 2006, MoUD, 2015 and NITI Aayog, 2017). Efforts to reform urban transport governance, primarily through the bolstering of local-level capacity, have been underway in India since 2006 but with limited affect due to lack of meaningful delegation of authority and financial power. However, in 2015 the Indian national government launched the Smart Cities Mission, aimed at going beyond what has been achieved before at the local level. The focus of the initiative is to promote 'cities that provide core infrastructure and give a decent quality of life to its citizens' through the application of 'Smart' Solutions (MoUD, 2015, p5). Within this context then, this research uses the Smart Cities Mission as a major opportunity to understand the aims and processes of transport governance reform and the extent to which these reforms are capable of achieving a significant improvement in the mobility system. To this end, the research will undertake a qualitative comparative analysis of previous and planned reforms in four of India's designated smart cities; Jaipur, Kochi, Indore and Bangalore. The research will characterise governance arrangements and governance reforms across each of the four cities, and in using the multi-level governance framework to guide empirical analysis, will be innovative in developing this framework within a non-Western context. The research will also trace the impacts of governance reforms through to impacts on the economic prosperity and quality of life of citizens through analysing changing processes and outcomes. This is essential if we are to move beyond identifying problems to understanding how to overcome them. The second aim of the research is to bring together, develop and inspire a community of researchers and practitioners to advance the study and understanding of mobility governance across India and between the UK and India. The research will be bottom-up in its approach; working with WRI India, the project will engage practitioners in the four cities from the outset to ensure the findings are as meaningful as possible. The interview protocol will be co-created with stakeholders and the data collection informed by the key challenges of urban mobility governance identified by stakeholders through exploratory workshops at the start of the project. A study visit to three UK cities that have experienced different levels of transport governance reform will be held for stakeholders from each of the four 'smart cities' to learn lessons from the UK experience and draw on practitioner expertise. A special session of the World Conference on Transport Research in Mumbai will also be convened to bring practitioners into dialogue with scholars at the forefront of research on transport governance in India and beyond. The project will also convene a 'summer school' in India for researchers to develop their research methods, theoretical perspectives and networks in relation to transport governance and reform. These activities will build both professional and research capacity to address future transport governance challenges.

According to projections, 100 percent of the population of NCT Delhi, Chandigarh and Lakshadweep in India were expected to live in urban areas by 2035. By contrast, slightly over ten percent of the population of Himachal Pradesh was expected to live in urban areas by the same year, which has the least share compared to the other states.

Contains data from the World Bank's data portal. There is also a consolidated country dataset on HDX.

Cities can be tremendously efficient. It is easier to provide water and sanitation to people living closer together, while access to health, education, and other social and cultural services is also much more readily available. However, as cities grow, the cost of meeting basic needs increases, as does the strain on the environment and natural resources. Data on urbanization, traffic and congestion, and air pollution are from the United Nations Population Division, World Health Organization, International Road Federation, World Resources Institute, and other sources.

This dataset is about books and is filtered where the book is Urbanization and urban India, featuring 7 columns including author, BNB id, book, book publisher, and ISBN. The preview is ordered by publication date (descending).

In financial year 2025, the Indian state of Delhi allocated the largest budget share to urban development, accounting for approximately 6.4 percent of their respective total budgets. Gujarat closely followed, with urban development receiving about 6.3 percent of the state's total budget.

India All States: Capital Expenditures: Outlay: Developmental: Social Services: Urban Development data was reported at 250,405.800 INR mn in 2019. This records an increase from the previous number of 195,695.100 INR mn for 2018. India All States: Capital Expenditures: Outlay: Developmental: Social Services: Urban Development data is updated yearly, averaging 17,744.100 INR mn from Mar 1991 (Median) to 2019, with 29 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 250,405.800 INR mn in 2019 and a record low of 296.600 INR mn in 1991. India All States: Capital Expenditures: Outlay: Developmental: Social Services: Urban Development data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Reserve Bank of India. The data is categorized under India Premium Database’s Government and Public Finance – Table IN.FI001: Capital Expenditure: All States.

The data being archived is drawn from interviews and participant content from the MMA app at the case study sites with members of the community being affected by the proposed smart city projects. These are interviews conducted at six case study sites with individuals and groups who are regular users of space at these sites. The themes cover histories of engagement with these spaces, community and business histories, personal geographies, and narratives of negotiating political engagements with various city-level actors such as local politicians, the municipality, and police.

The coming of an Indian urban age has highlighted the challenges of rapid urbanisation and rural-urban migration in planning for sustainable futures. In India, solutions to this challenge are imagined in two interlinked programmes of Digital India and 100 Smart Cities that claim to present a new 'certainty' of governing urban futures. This project begins with the hypothesis that 'small cities' are the test-beds of experiments in 'futuring', since a majority of current smart city proposals are in cities with population < 3 million. These small cities present a 'double gap' in our knowledge of urban futures since a) there is uncertainty around the role that they will play in delivering on the challenges of India's urban age, and b) there is a research gap in understanding how their futuring is translated into 'actually existing' smart cities in India.

This two year project will critically learn from the dynamics of change in small cities as they are transformed by smart technologies and infrastructures. It will use interdisciplinary approaches from urban, social and cultural geography, as well as sociology and geoinformatics to learn from three small cities - Shimla, Jalandhar and Nashik. Conceptually, we approach 'small cities' not as demographically defined entities but as 'ordinary cities' with specific social, cultural, political, and historical contexts of 'smallness' that has kept them 'off the map' of urban studies. This project will focus on three interlinked scales - state, city and citizen through the following research questions:

1. How and why do small cities become the test-beds of state imaginations of India's urban futures? At a national scale, we will explore how and why state visions of 'futuring', through Digital India and 100 Smart Cities programmes, make specific 'assets' in small cities worthy of incubating these imaginaries. Specifically, we will investigate the genealogies of 'futuring' in India's urbanization and its links to current visions of smart cities.
2. How do small cities translate state imagined urban futures into 'actually existing' smart cities? Building on RQ1, we will explore how small cities imagine their own urban futures, through particular smart city projects. Specifically, we will examine how small cities learn to innovate by championing their 'assets' in a competitive international context while negotiating for more autonomous roles in governing their futures.
3. How do citizens of small cities 'live with change' induced by smart city developments? Following on from RQ1 and 2 above, we will investigate how smart city projects are perceived by those citizens who are targets of these projects at the neighbourhood level; how they are experienced, negotiated, challenged and supported. This takes 'futuring' as a lived experience of change where everyday knowledge of community assets, resources and infrastructures will be used to inform smart city policies at larger scales.
4. How can we 'learn' from small cities to inform practices of 'thinking' and 'doing' urban policy? This brings together the above RQs to take learning as a reflective practice in urban theory and policy. Specifically, we will focus on how learning occurs at three interlinked scales of state, city and citizen and how this transform the ways that we might imagine global urban futures.

The project will use a range of interdisciplinary, digital, visual and participatory methodologies. In each of these cities, we will undertake analysis of imagined urban futures through longitudinal mapping and analysis of physical and social transformations, crowdsourced digital and community asset mapping and interviews with stakeholders and 'beneficiaries' of smart city projects. The findings will direct specific pathways to impact including an animated infographic of smart city asset toolkit, local language policy briefing pamphlets, dedicated website, blogs, project conference, exhibition and catalogue.

The spreadsheet consists of multiple attributes of case study cities.

Contains data from World Bank's data portal covering various economic and social indicators (one per resource).

In 2022, roughly 43 percent of Bhutan's population resided in urban areas. Comparatively, approximately 19 percent of Sri Lanka's population lived in urban areas in 2022.

Urbanization in the APAC region

The Asia-Pacific region is currently experiencing a significant trend towards urbanization, with a growing number of individuals relocating from rural areas to urban centers in pursuit of improved economic prospects. From 2015 to 2020, there was an increase in the urban population throughout Asia. The projection for the region indicates a continuation of urbanization, although at a decelerated rate. As of 2021, a third of the entire population of India resided in urban areas. The data shows a notable upsurge in urbanization in India over the past ten years, indicating a shift of the populace from rural to urban centers in search of employment opportunities and livelihood.

 Population of megacities in APAC 

The APAC region is home to some of the world's most populous megacities. According to recent data, in 2023, the annual metropolitan population growth rate of China surpassed that of other megacities in the APAC region. In contrast to other cities, the three megacities in Japan, namely Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, exhibited the lowest annual population growth rates. That same year, the APAC region was home to 28 megacities, more than ten of which were in China. India, Japan, and Pakistan also had more than once megacity each as of January 2023.

Urbanization in a developing economy, Indian perspectives and patterns is a book. It was written by Debnath Mookherjee and published by Sage Publications in 1973.

Additional file 2: Raw Dietary Diversity Data Collected. Raw Dietary Diversity Data Collected. Excel sheet of food consumption data collected from participants by enumerators.

India HUDCO: Number of Dwelling Approved: Cumulative: New: Kartanaka data was reported at 2,449,799.000 Unit in 2018. This stayed constant from the previous number of 2,449,799.000 Unit for 2017. India HUDCO: Number of Dwelling Approved: Cumulative: New: Kartanaka data is updated yearly, averaging 2,178,179.500 Unit from Mar 2008 (Median) to 2018, with 10 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 2,510,480.000 Unit in 2016 and a record low of 1,719,757.000 Unit in 2008. India HUDCO: Number of Dwelling Approved: Cumulative: New: Kartanaka data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Housing and Urban Development Corporation Limited. The data is categorized under India Premium Database’s Construction and Property – Table IN.ED010: Housing Statistics: Housing and Urban Development Corporation Limited (HUDCO): Number of Dwelling Approved: by States.

This statistic shows the ten countries with the largest increase in the size of the urban population between 2018 and 2050. Based on forecasted population figures, the urban population of India is projected to be around 416 million more in 2050 than it was in 2018.

This raster layer contains urban land use and land cover data for Poona, India in 2000. Categories of urban land use represented in these data include: urban, nonurban, water and other. Urban land cover, or urban extent, is typically measured by the total built-up area (or impervious surface) of cities, sometimes including the open spaces captured by their built-up areas and the open spaces on the urban fringe affected by urban development. Urban land is occupied by urban uses that include all land in residential, commercial, industrial, and office use; land used for transport, parks, and public facilities; protected land, and vacant land. Land in urban use does not include cultivated lands, pasture lands, forests, farms and villages, intercity roads, and nature areas. These data are part of the Atlas of Urban Expansion.

This point layer displays the Central Business District (CBD) of Hyderbad, India as a point corresponding to the location of its city hall. For the compactness metrics, the proximity index measures the relative closeness of all locations in the city to its center. To calculate the proximity index, the Equal Area Circle was defined as a circle with an area equal to that of the urban footprint centered at the city's city hall within the CBD. This data is part of the Atlas of Urban Expansion.

Abstract Building on the implications of qualitative work from India and urbanism theories, I aim to understand whether religious bonding social capital in contemporary India increases with greater urbanization and whether such increases are moderated by caste or social class position. Results from multinomial logistic regression on 1,417 Hindu respondents in a nationally representative sample of India (World Values Survey-India 2001) indicate that religious bonding is fostered by urbanism and that this association is stronger for upper castes. But there is little evidence that social class similarly moderates the association between urbanism and religious bonding. In light of these findings, religious bonding might be better understood as rooted in the interaction of caste dynamics and changes in the urban environment, rather than as a result of greater affluence. The data are also consistent with work underscoring the importance of disentangling social class and caste among Hindus in contemporary India.

How do rising temperatures affect long-term labor reallocation in developing economies? In this paper, we examine how increases in temperature impact structural transformation and urbanization within Indian districts between 1951 and 2011. We find that rising temperatures are associated with lower shares of workers in non-agriculture, with effects intensifying over a longer time frame. Supporting evidence suggests that local demand effects play an important role: declining agricultural productivity under higher temperatures reduces the demand for non-agricultural goods and services, which subsequently lowers non-agricultural labor demand. Our results illustrate that rising temperatures limit sectoral and rural-urban mobility for isolated households.