Global and Indian Perspectives on Urbanisation Trends

Step outside in any Indian city today and you will notice how the skyline keeps changing every few years. New apartment towers, wider roads, metro lines snaking overhead. This transformation is not unique to India. Across the world, more people now live in cities than ever before, and the pace of this shift is reshaping how governments plan housing, transport, and public services. Understanding this global and Indian urban story helps explain why urban policy has become one of the most pressing subjects in development studies today.

Urbanisation at the global level 🔗

Urban growth over the past seven decades has been dramatic. In 1950, only about a fifth of the world’s population lived in cities. By 2025, that figure has more than doubled, with cities now home to 45 per cent of the global population of 8.2 billion, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Looking ahead, two-thirds of all future global population growth is expected to happen in cities, with most of the rest occurring in towns.

One of the clearest markers of this shift is the rise of megacities, urban areas with ten million or more residents. Their number has quadrupled from 8 in 1975 to 33 in 2025, and more than half of these giant cities are located in Asia. Jakarta has overtaken older giants to become the world’s most populous city, followed closely by Dhaka and Tokyo.

Interestingly, growth is not uniform even within the same country. Some cities are expanding rapidly while thousands of smaller urban centres are actually shrinking. Around 3,000 cities worldwide lost population between 2015 and 2025, and most of these had fewer than 250,000 residents, showing that urban growth and urban decline can happen side by side even within a single nation.

Developed vs developing countries: different urban stories 🔗

Not every country urbanises the same way. Most developed nations completed their major urban transitions decades ago, often alongside industrialisation that created enough jobs to absorb workers moving from villages to cities. Their urbanisation levels are now high, frequently above 80 per cent, and their challenges today are more about managing ageing infrastructure, urban shrinkage, and environmental sustainability than about accommodating fresh waves of migrants.

The developing world’s dilemma 🔗

Developing countries, particularly across Asia and Africa, are urbanising at a much faster pace but without matching gains in institutional capacity or infrastructure. Researchers have described this mismatch using terms like over-urbanisation and pseudo-urbanisation, meaning that urban population growth has become decoupled from the actual provision of infrastructure and services. Cities in the Global South are growing in numbers but struggling to deliver adequate water, housing, sanitation, and transport to match that growth.

Towns, not just cities, matter 🔗

Another distinctive pattern is that towns, rather than large cities, remain the dominant form of settlement in many countries. Globally, roughly 2.9 billion people live in towns and semi-dense areas, and a significant share of them are concentrated in India and China alone. This matters because policy conversations often focus only on megacities, while the bulk of urban India actually lives in these smaller, less-discussed towns.

Urbanisation in India: growth and demographic trends 🔗

India’s urban journey looks quite different from the rapid, industry-led urbanisation seen in countries like Japan or South Korea. Census data shows that India’s urban share rose from about 17.3 per cent in 1951 to 31.16 per cent in 2011, an average increase of just over two percentage points per decade. This is a gradual pace compared to the sharp urban surges seen elsewhere in Asia.

What is often surprising is that the 1980s and 1990s actually saw a slowdown in the rate of urban growth in India, even though this period is popularly remembered as one of industrial expansion. The economic liberalisation of 1991 did not immediately trigger a wave of urban migration either. Growth picked up again only after 2001, when the number of urban settlements jumped sharply, driven in large part by villages being reclassified as census towns rather than by people physically moving in large numbers.

The role of industry and services 🔗

Where India’s urbanisation has been shaped by industry, it has tended to concentrate around specific manufacturing and service hubs rather than spreading evenly. Cities built around IT, textiles, and manufacturing corridors have absorbed workers steadily, but this growth has been geographically uneven, favouring a handful of states and metropolitan regions over others.

Challenges in Indian urbanisation 🔗

India’s urban expansion comes with a distinct set of structural problems that differ from the challenges faced by fully urbanised economies.

Pseudo-urbanisation and census towns 🔗

A large part of India’s recorded urban growth between 2001 and 2011 came not from cities expanding outward but from rural settlements being statistically reclassified as census towns once they crossed certain population and occupational thresholds. Scholars studying this phenomenon note that many of these newly counted “urban” areas function without the governance structures, municipal services, or planning oversight that genuine urban administration requires. This gap between statistical urban status and the real availability of services is at the heart of what is termed pseudo-urbanisation.

The migration puzzle 🔗

Popular narratives often assume that Indian cities are bursting at the seams because of mass rural-to-urban migration. The data tells a more nuanced story. The share of net rural-to-urban migration in India’s total urban population growth has remained fairly constant at around 20 per cent for several decades, with the rest coming from natural population increase within cities and the reclassification of villages. This suggests Indian cities have not been generating enough new employment to pull in large numbers of migrants the way rapidly industrialising economies once did.

Uneven development and informal settlements 🔗

Where migration and natural growth do concentrate, the pressure on infrastructure is severe. Slums remain one of the most visible symptoms of this strain. According to Census figures, slum populations made up a substantial share of India’s total urban population, reflecting how cities often expand faster than their capacity to provide affordable, formal housing. Roads, sewage systems, and water supply networks originally designed for smaller populations end up serving many times their intended capacity.

Policy implications for India 🔗

Given this uneven and complex urban reality, India’s policy response has increasingly shifted from viewing urbanisation as a problem to be contained toward treating it as a process that needs sustainable and inclusive management.

Flagship missions driving change 🔗

Since 2015, the Government of India has run several centrally sponsored programmes to address these gaps. The Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation, the Smart Cities Mission, and the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Urban together target water supply, sanitation, housing, and technology-enabled city management. AMRUT alone has helped raise tap water coverage in participating cities from under half to around seventy per cent over roughly a decade, alongside major expansions in sewage treatment capacity.

The Smart Cities Mission took a different approach, encouraging area-based redevelopment and the use of technology for governance, transport, and utilities across a hundred selected cities, before formally concluding in March 2025. Notably, its design deliberately avoided a rigid, one-size-fits-all definition of what a “smart city” should look like, allowing local urban bodies some flexibility to define priorities suited to their own context.

Why inclusive planning matters going forward 🔗

Programmes alone cannot solve structural issues like pseudo-urbanisation or uneven regional growth. Experts studying the implementation of these missions point out that outcomes vary significantly between well-resourced metropolitan administrations and smaller regional cities that face capacity constraints. This unevenness means that future urban policy needs to pay closer attention to the thousands of small and medium towns where most of India’s urban population actually lives, rather than concentrating investment only in headline metro projects.

There is also a growing recognition that urban policy must be linked with rural development and industrial planning together, since much of India’s urban pressure stems from insufficient employment generation in both rural areas and existing towns. Genuine sustainable urbanisation will likely require stronger municipal governance, better data on informal settlements, and urban plans that are built around the realities of migration and livelihoods rather than administrative convenience alone.

What do you think? Should India’s urban policies focus more on strengthening thousands of small towns rather than concentrating resources in a few large metro cities? And can reclassifying villages as “urban” on paper genuinely improve people’s access to services, or does it only paper over the real gaps in planning and governance?

References

1. https://www.un.org/en/desa/WUP-2025
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264275119301271
3. https://www.copernicus.eu/en/news/news/observer-seven-things-we-learned-un-world-urbanization-prospects
4. https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization
5. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-95-7758-3_4
6. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=2028584
7. https://www.ibef.org/government-schemes/smart-cities-mission