Injected Urbanism? Exploring India’s Urbanizing Periphery

Does urbanization depend on in-migration? Demography, mobility, and India's urban transition

“…Second, temporary migration effectively expands the territorial scale of a given settlement's labor market; households can draw income from a more diverse range of locations than if workers labored only locally. As van Duijne et al (2023) show in their recent article, this enables a local economic transition away from agriculture by enhancing local demand for nonfarm goods and services. In addition, while these districts do not have a higher rate of permanent out-migration than the average district in India (a population-weighted average of about 7% and 8%, respectively, over the period of analysis), the states in which they are located are major recipients of remittances from internal migrants (Tumbe, 2018); these remittance flows are further fuel for their nonfarm economies.…”

“…Researchers there call the constant flow of temporary migrants between urban and rural areas "circulatory urbanism" (Srivastava and Echanove, 2013) and estimate that there may be as many as 100 million circular migrants (Deshingkar and Akter, 2009). Only recently have scholars considered that circulatory population movements into and out of cities might be producing (urban) transformations in rural places (Iyer, 2017;van Duijne et al, 2023). Moreover, existing scholarship generally neglects the fact that barriers to permanent rural-urban migration, such as those identified in India, may lead to the persistence of rural settlements or indeed their attainment of urban population densities.…”

“…Are parts of India urbanizing-in the conventional sense of becoming dense, populous, and economically complex-without experiencing net in-migration? Not only has this question never been directly addressed in the literature on India's urban transition; it has never been studied empirically in any scholarship on in situ urbanization or rural-to-urban transformation, despite the wealth of writing on the subject (Balakrishnan, 2019a;Gururani, 2020;McGee, 1991;Mukhopadhyay et al, 2020;Potts, 2018;van Duijne et al, 2023;Zhu, 2004). My analysis addresses this gap, relying on a combination of government and satellite-based datasets to juxtapose urbanization and migration patterns.…”

Air pollution attributed disease burden and economic growth in India: Estimating trends and inequality between states

“… 2 Gross state domestic product Handbook of statistics on Indian states, 2021. 3 Annual gross domestic production of each Indian states 3 Data on motor vehicles registered Ministry of Road Transport & Highway yearbooks 4 Number of new motor vehicles registered annually in each state 4 Population Census reports 5 , 6 Total population and total urban population in each state in India 5 Data on number of functional factories Handbook of statistics on Indian states, 2021. 3 , 7 Total number of functional factories in each state 6 Age standardized Air pollution attributed disease burden GBD web repository 1 , 2 Age adjusted disease burden data for the individual Indian states from “India State-Level Disease Burden Initiative”, as part of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2019.…”

“… 3 India accommodates nearly 18% of the world's population, 4 and urbanisation trends are at an accelerated pace. 5 The population density and resource dependence are very high in India, and so is the exposure to pollution and its related morbidity. 6 …”