Is Your City Too Big? Causes of Urban Primacy in India

In this article, we examine the degree of urban primacy and understand what explains urban primacy in the Indian states. We estimated Zipf’s law for Indian states for 2001 and 2011. We then regressed the urban population in the largest city in each state as dependent on various factors. We find Kerala had the least primacy as of 2011, whereby its biggest city contained only 5% of its urban population. Based on the second-stage regression, we find that the state per capita income, population and length of railways have a significantly negative effect on primacy, while MSME employment increases it. We examine the highway network in selected states characterized by severe primacy and find a major problem with national transport priorities. The policy implications are for improving the national highway network and rail routes in the states to increase MSME employment and increase state income to reduce primacy.