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Does Urban Decline lead to Urban Shrinkage in India?

Nawaj Sarif, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)
Archana K. Roy, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)

Urban shrinkage, the process when a city experiences long-term population decline and economic decay, has drawn attention of planners and academic communities in recent past. It’s not only confined to the developed countries which have attend high urbanization levels but also being experienced by developing countries where urbanization level is still low. India is also facing this paradoxical situation as, India accounts for 18% of shrinking cities in developing countries (UN Habitat, 2008) even with 31% of urbanization level. This study aims to identify declining and shrinking cities in India and understand its drivers. In India, about 11 out of 100 cities have declined during 2001-2011 and 2 have shrunk. There has been 102 cities that experienced negative population growth for two consecutive decades since 1991. It is prevalent among small and medium towns in India. On the contrary, large cities are declining and sub-urbanization and de-industrialization process drives cities into decline. It is now important to understand whether it is sub-urbanization, decline or shrinkage. Development policies promotes large investments in larger cities while small and medium towns are often ignored. It is thus necessary to revive small and medium towns through capital investment and infrastructure development.

Keywords: Urbanization and urban populations, Population size and growth/decline, Census data, Population geography

See extended abstract.

  Presented in Session P15.