India’s rural-urban population characteristics can be described as follows:
- About 68.8 per cent of India’s population resides in rural areas as per the Census 2011, with 93.2 per cent of 640,867 villages being inhabited.
- The distribution of the rural population is uneven across states, with higher concentrations in Himachal Pradesh and Bihar, and lower levels in Goa and Mizoram.
- The size of villages differs widely, ranging from fewer than 200 people in the hill states of the north-east to nearly 17,000 people in Kerala and parts of Maharashtra.
- Processes such as urbanisation and migration from rural to urban areas play an important role in shaping rural population distribution.
- India’s urban population accounts for 31.16 per cent, reflecting rapid growth driven by economic development and improved healthcare and sanitation facilities.
- Most states and Union Territories have witnessed an increase in urban population, indicating rising urbanisation and rural-to-urban migration.
- Urbanisation is more pronounced along major road and railway corridors in the North Indian Plains and in industrial belts such as Kolkata, Mumbai, Bengaluru-Mysuru, Madurai-Coimbatore, Ahmedabad-Surat, Delhi-Kanpur, and Ludhiana-Jalandhar.
- Low levels of urbanisation are observed in agriculturally stagnant regions like the middle and lower Ganga Plains, Telangana, non-irrigated western Rajasthan, remote tribal areas of the northeast, flood-prone Peninsular regions, and eastern India.
