Velocity/Speed of Urbanization in India: An Introspective Study

Towns/Cities become more concentrated centres of economic activity and innovation serving as hubs for trade, transportation, and information flow, on account of which more and more people tend to live in urban areas migrating from rural areas. Urbanization is continuously growing and expanding. It is a common way to express the degree or level of urbanization. Objective: The objective of this study is to find out the speed or velocity at which the urbanization is going on. Methodology: This study is descriptive type by nature and based on secondary sources. The data are collected from various census reports, books, articles, websites and web-based journals published at different times. Results and Discussion: The census data for 110 years with effect from 1901 to 2011 is used to calculate the speed/velocity and trend of urbanization in India. Findings: Through different ways of presentations, mathematically and diagrammatically, it is found that urbanization in India has been expanding from the very beginning, 1901 census to the 2011 census but at different velocities at different census years. There is a shifting of the rural population towards urban areas.  Conclusion: The velocity of urbanization, which includes both direction and speed, can be used to estimate the rate of growth and the geographic expansion of urban areas in India. The ensuing change in land cover can be further enhanced by combining the geographic pattern of velocity of urbanization, which reveals radically outward expansions of high-density urban population.