Determinants of Urbanization in Different Size/Class Distribution of Cities/Towns in India

While there are several studies that have investigated the determinants of urbanization in India by considering all the cities/towns together or only large cities, this paper tries to investigate it by considering different class/size of cities of major states separately. For the analysis we use OLS regression model by considering latest Census data in 2011. Urbanization is conventionally measured by size/growth/density of city population. On the other hand, this study considers environmental effect (rain fall and temperature), spatial interaction effect (road distance to state headquarters/subdivision headquarters/ nearest city with population 1 lakh/ 5 lakh or more) and basic infrastructural facilities (number of school/colleges/universities/electricity connections/road length) to investigate the determinants of urbanization in different class/size cities in India. The results show that though overall environment and infrastructural facilities have a positive effect and spatial interaction has negative effect on urbanization, the results obtained here differ from earlier ones in respect of different size/class of cities/towns as also different measurements of urbanization. Finally, the paper suggests that for promotion of urbanization in India different urban policies have to be evolved to suit different size/class of cities/towns. Otherwise, India will face the problem of unbalanced urbanization which may not unlock the full potential contribution of urbanization on economic growth in India