URBANISATION AND URBAN SPRAWL

India’s urban population is currently growing at about 2.3 percent per annum and it is projected that the country’s urban population would increase from 28.3 percent in 2003 to about 41.4 percent by 2030 (United Nations, 2004). By 2001, there were 35 urban agglomerations (cities having a population of more than one million), as compared to 25 urban agglomerations of 1991. This increased urban population and growth in urban areas is inadvertent due to an unpremeditated population growth and migration. Urban growth, as such is a continuously evolving natural process due to growth of population (birth and death). The number of urban agglomerations and towns has increased from 3697 in 1991 to 4369 in 2001 (Census of India, 2001). An imminent urbanisation coupled with economic development has transformed societies and cultures apart from the landscapes, and the natural environment. Cautioning that attributing simply the growth of cities to urbanisation, Davis (1965) notes that urbanisation refers to the proportion of the total population concentrated in urban settlements, or else the rise in this proportion. It is argued that since urbanisation would account for the total population composed of both urban and rural, the proportion of urban is a function of both of them. Accordingly, cities can grow without urbanisation provided the rural population grows at an equal or greater rate. Thus the process of urbanisation is fairly contributed by rural-urban migration leading to the higher proportional population growth of urban-rural and infrastructure initiatives, resulting in the growth of villages into towns, towns into cities and cities into metros.

Towns and cities are expanding in certain pockets with a change in the land-use along the highways and in the immediate vicinity of the cities due to ad hoc approaches in regional planning, governance and decision-making. This outgrowth along highways and roads connecting a city and in the periphery of the cities is caused by the uncontrolled and uncoordinated urban growth. This dispersed development outside compact urban and rural centres that is along highways and in rural countryside is referred to as sprawl. Sprawl generally refers to some type of development with impacts such as losses of agricultural lands, open spaces, and ecologically sensitive habitats in and around the urban areas. These regions lack basic amenities due to the unplanned growth and lack of prior information and forecasts of such growth during policy, planning and decision-making.

The magnitude and nature of urban sprawl is quite different in the developed countries than to that of a rapidly developing and largely rural-agrarian populated country like India. The problem of sprawl is magnified in the developed countries after reaching saturation levels of urbanisation. Conversely, most of the developing and under-developed countries are now urbanising rapidly and already prone to the problem of sprawl at an even worse magnitude. A significant difference in the urbanisation patterns of developed and developing countries is that of population densities. The developed countries embraced urbanisation after industrialisation wherein the population growth rates and densities were lower, with a prosperous economy and technology to support. Conversely, developing countries are having high population growth rates and densities, in the midst of economic development, with lack of basic amenities and urbanisation taking place at a rapid rate. In India, already 28 percent of the population live in urban areas and these cities are expanding like never before, with inadequacies in facilities for transportation, water supply and sanitation, energy demands, etc. With a booming economic activity on the one side and large population in unorganised sectors of employment with inadequate housing on the other, rise of slums and squatters in urban areas seems inevitable.