Question

speech on urbanisation

Answer 1

Urbanisation is the process by which large number of people becomes permanently concentrated in small areas forming cities. The definition of a city or an urban area changes from time to time and place to place.

The United Nations Organisation has recommended that member countries regard all places with more than 20,000 inhabitants living close together as urban; but, in fact nations compile their statistics on the basis of many different standards. United States, for instance, uses “urban place” to mean any locality where more than 2,500 people live.

Urban Population Increases by:

(1) Natural increase of the urban population;

(2) Migration from rural areas; and

(3) Transformation of rural areas into urban areas through;

(a) Upgrading of places into new towns through notifications;

(b) Establishment of new industrial townships; and

(c) Growth of urban agglomerations.

The share of urban population, in India, has increased from about 11 per cent in 1911 to about 28 per cent in 2001. The rate of urbanisation has, however, been uneven across the states. The Union Territory of Delhi is the most urbanised with as much as 93.18 per cent of its population living in urban areas.

Goa is the most urbanised among the states with almost one half of its population living in urban areas. The least urbanised state is Himachal Pradesh (9.3 per cent) and the least urbanised Union Territory is Dadra and Nagar Haveli (22.89 per cent).

Urbanisation is considered beneficial because of better opportunity for earning higher incomes, better infrastructure and better awareness and response of people to social issues in general. Urabanisation thereby contributes to modernisation and social change. The birth rate, the death rate, IMR and fertility rates are lower in urban areas than in rural areas.

However, urbanisation is not an unmixed blessing. Shortage of land, the growing gap between the demand and supply of basic facilities and services (e.g. housing, water supply, sanitary services, electricity, roads, public transport, etc.) and finally, massive environmental pollution in cities, adversely affect the quality of urban life.

The total slum population in cities, especially in mega and metro cities have been increasing, 93 million Indians to live in urban slums by the census of 2011. However, it is also a fact that the slum population in cities and towns provide several essential services to the urban populace although the levels of their access to basic services are very poor.

Answer 2

The concept of urbanization has a dual meaning—demographically and sociologically. The demographic meaning refers to the increasing proportion of population in a country or a region that resides in cities. Sociologically, it refers to the behaviour, institutions and materialistic things that are identified as urban in origin and use. In other words, it is a social process which is the cause and consequence of a change in the man’s way of life in the urban milieu.
In the urban areas, one can find a range of features like the loss of primary relationship and increasing secondary group relationship, voluntary associations, plurality of norms and values, weaker social control, increasing secularization and segmentary roles—a greater division of labour, greater importance of the mass media and the tendency for the urbanites to treat each other instrumentally. Sociologists believe that all these are caused due to large number of population, which is heterogeneous, having come from various backgrounds.
Thus, the more denser, larger and heterogeneous the community the more accentuated are the characteristics associated with the urban way of life. Another aspect is that in the social world, institutions and practices may be accepted and continued for reasons other than those that originally brought them into existence and that accordingly the urban mode of life may be perpetuated under conditions quite foreign to those necessary for its origin.