Source: ET
Context: Economic Advisory Council to the PM has suggested tweaking the definition of rural-urban areas.
Issues with current classification:
Current classification uses a combination of administrative definition and census criteria, which are often inadequate in capturing the speed and scale of urbanization in India. As a result, urban areas are often governed by panchayats, which are less efficient in the provisioning of public goods than urban local bodies
Suggestions:
- The definition should be tweaked by including technological indicators like night-time light intensity
- Establishing a trigger mechanism to allow automatic transition from rural to urban settlement after the prescribed threshold is reached.
- Government should revisit the assumption of creating schemes based on the rural-urban divide
Current Definition
As of 2017, any settlement that is not considered ‘urban’ is automatically considered ‘rural’.
Two types of urban settlements:
- Administratively urban settlements: They are those that are governed by an Urban Local Body (ULB).
- Census Urban Settlements: They are those that have a population greater than 5000, 75% of the male population working in non-agriculture, and a density of 400 people per sq. Km.
