Question

classification basic rural and urban settlement

Answer 1

Rural-urban classification constitutes an important framework for the collection and compilation of population data in many countries. While “urban” is often specifically defined, “rural” is treated simply as a residual category. The criteria defining urban also differ from country to country. This paper argues that these rural and urban statistical categories are also highly significant for local governance, increasingly so in recent years given the emphasis on local governance and its restructuring. In India, constitutional amendments have given constitutional status to local bodies in the federal structure of the country. Local bodies are thus now expected to draw up their own plans and initiate development works, which requires them to generate their own resources and lessen their dependence on central government funding. It is thus necessary to reorganize urban space into viable spatial units in terms of their revenue base. While rural-urban classification is the task of the Census of India, state governments are responsible for granting municipal status to urban centres. This paper examines the criteria and limitations of the rural-urban classification followed by the Census, its congruence with the dynamics of state-accorded municipal/non-municipal status and some implications for municipal governance in India.

Answer 2

While “agricultural and rural development” is one of the key policy areas, there is no universally accepted way on how to classify the urban and rural. On one hand, dissatisfied with the OECD approach in which a “rural area” is defined merely based on the population density, there has been a rich literature in the statistical discourse and policy debate on what other variables should be considered and included for the urban-rural typology. On the other hand, according to the rural areas observed in OECD countries, where the population has migrated to the urban and agricultural production has become less important, some people argue that the traditional way of thinking “rural” as the same of “agricultural” is not true anymore for the developed countries and the same transformation is going on in the developing countries. The salient feature of this paper is to apply an econometric logistic regression model to two datasets for Italy, an OECD country and China, a non-OECD country. The results of the model unambiguously demonstrate that, first, to classify the rural and urban, a multidimensional approach by taking into account both economic activities and geographic dimension along with population density is more appropriate; and second, agriculture is still highly relevant to the rural, and thus an important determinant factor in defining the rural area.