The Village in the City,the City in the Village

A n important concomitant of urban­isation in India is that villa­ges l­ocated outside the boundaries of a city get included in it over time. There are more than 300 such villages within Delhi now and every other city I know has such villages in varying numbers. There is no readily available count for the country as a whole, but I am sure it would be large. This phenomenon has been intensifying since the 1950s and is sure to intensify further. India is on the path of rapid urbanisation, and the u­rban development autho­rities of all cities are planning to draw more and more villages into their nets. The causes and consequences of the pheno­menon therefore require careful analysis.

How a village gets included within a city is usually a long drawn process. It is necessary to recall that in most parts of India a village is made up of, first, a residential settlement (gaon-than or abadi area) where houses and huts are huddled together,¹ and second, agricultural fields, pasture (gauchar) land, water tanks and ponds, cart tracks, wasteland, and other open territory all around it.² The two together constitute a territorial unit called the “revenue village” (mauza in most parts of India) with fixed boundaries recognised for local administration.³ Often it includes, besides the main settlement, one or more small subsidiary settlements, or “satellite villages”, as M N Srinivas called them. On the other hand, a mauza may not have any residential settlement, in which case it is called a “deserted village”.