Q.How are a village, town and city distinguished from each other?

The chapter uses two specific criteria rather than population size alone to tell villages, towns and cities apart. …

The chapter distinguishes these settlement types along two main lines. First, villages are distinguished from towns/cities mainly by two economic-administrative criteria rather than by size alone, since a large village and a small town can be hard to separate by population count: population density (persons per unit area) and the share of agriculture-related economic activity. Towns and cities have much higher population density even though villages, being more spread out, can sometimes cover a larger absolute area; and villages have a significantly larger share of their population, output and income tied to agriculture, whereas towns and cities do not.

Second, the distinction between a town and a city is essentially administrative rather than functional — a town and a city are the same basic kind of settlement, differing mainly in size and official classification. Beyond individual towns and cities, two further terms are useful: an 'urban agglomeration' is a city together with its surrounding suburban areas and satellite settlements, while a 'metropolitan area' includes more than one city, or one continuous urban settlement many times larger than a single city. Finally, this connects to the broader process of urbanisation — the progressive shift of population from rural to urban areas — with India's urban popula …