{"word_count": 222, "character_count": 1383}
It’s time to refashion policies keeping in mind India is urbanizing at a faster pace than estimatesRecently, Mint published a series on urbanization and small towns in India. It is also important to look at the analytic aspects of the process of urbanization and policies for it. In the middle of the last decade we established what we called “large villages” which met the census criteria of towns that were not classified as urban areas by the government. This led to a pessimistic perception of urbanization by experts like Rakesh Mohan and Amitabh Kundu. We argued then that a part of this pessimistic perception might arise from settlements which are “urban” by census definitions but which are still not classified as “urban”. While the absolute differences on this account may be small, due to the nature of computational methods to arrive at population projections, in the end “small” absolute differences can lead to “large” end differences and may affect projections. These can lead to the wrong policy choices on urbanization. Applying the census criteria of considering rural areas as non-statutory towns, to village-wise data of 2001 census, it was estimated that out of 18,539 populated villages of Gujarat, 122 villages were classified as non-statutory towns, which the Mint articles call census towns.Yoginder K. Alagh for live mint, 7th October 2012Full article here