Urbanisation

The concept of greenfield new towns is as old as civilisation in the Indian subcontinent. Socio-spatial equity has been at the core of the new town experiment during its origin in the Garden City movement. India has witnessed the new town wave post 1947, with the unstated mandate to serve the constitutional “common good,” in order to address the ills of the colonial inheritance of the divided city. The Indian new town has undergone major changes towards a more exclusive private enclave. The statutory planning discourse in India through the national five-year plans, which have helmed socio-economic–political planning, as well as the evolutionary curve of this discourse holds reasons for the changing face of new towns in India.

An exploration of the trends and patterns of sex ratio at birth in urban India and the processes behind son preference suggests a systematic worsening of SRB with increasing urban district size classes. The likelihood of giving birth to a son at the first order is highest among women with a stated son preference, which continues to effect second and third order births, given the sex of the previous child. The interrelationship between SRB and educational attainment shows an inverted U-shape. A balanced SRB among poor women corroborates their unbiased gender preference. In contrast, wealthier women and those with exposure to mass media exhibit poor SRB, although they report a neutral preference.

The growth of the manufacturing sector is important for employing a growing labour force and much is also dependent on their skill level. Enterprise surveys in six sample towns of Bihar, a state characterised by slow industrialisation and urbanisation, find evidence of fairly strong rural–urban linkages for manufacturing enterprises. Although the linkages indicate that the manufacturing sector has the maximum potential to create employment by absorbing the surplus labour in the rural areas, it was found that this sector has been languishing in the sample towns. The findings also flag the challenges and areas of growth for industries.

Urban and Regional Planning and Development: 20th Century Formations and 21st Century Transformations edited by Rajiv R Thakur, Ashok K Dutt, Sudhir K Thakur and George M Pomeroy, Springer Nature Switzerland, 2019; pp xiv + 546, ₹ 9,726 (hardcover).

A Population History of India: From the First Modern People to the Present Day by Tim Dyson, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018; pp 310, £36.99.