Rural-Urban Differences

The vast majority of India’s population has always lived in rural areas, and that remains true today. According to the Census of India 2011, 68.8% of the population lives in rural areas, while 31.2% lives in urban areas. But the urban share has been growing steadily — from about 11% at the start of the twentieth century to about 28% at the start of the twenty-first, an increase of roughly two-and-a-half times.

It is not just a matter of numbers. Processes of modern development ensure that the economic and social significance of the agrarian-rural way of life declines relative to the industrial-urban way of life. This has been broadly true all over the world, and it is true in India as well.

Agriculture used to be by far the largest contributor to the country’s economy, but today it contributes only about one-sixth of the gross domestic product. While the majority of people still live in rural areas and make their living from agriculture, the relative economic value of what they produce has fallen drastically.

More and more people who live in villages may no longer work in agriculture or even in the village itself. Rural people are increasingly engaged in non-farm rural occupations such as transport services, business enterprises, or craft manufacturing. If they live close enough to a town, they may travel daily to the nearest urban centre for work while continuing to live in the village.

Mass media and communication channels now bring images of urban lifestyles and patterns of consumption into rural areas. Urban norms and standards are becoming well known even in remote villages, creating new desires and aspirations for consumption. Mass transit and mass communication are bridging the gap between rural and urban areas. Even in the past, rural areas were never really beyond the reach of market forces, and today they are being more closely integrated into the consumer market.

From an urban point of view, the rapid growth in urbanisation shows that the town or city has been acting as a magnet for the rural population. Those who cannot find work — or sufficient work — in rural areas go to the city in search of employment.

This flow of rural-to-urban migration has also been accelerated by the continuous decline of common property resources like ponds, forests, and grazing lands. These common resources enabled poor people to survive in villages even though they owned little or no land. Now, these resources have been turned into private property, or they are exhausted — ponds may run dry or no longer provide enough fish, forests may have been cut down and vanished. If people no longer have access to these resources, but on the other hand have to buy many things in the market that they used to get free — like fuel, fodder, or supplementary food items — then their hardship increases. This hardship is worsened by the fact that opportunities for earning cash income are limited in villages.

Sometimes the city may also be preferred for social reasons, especially the relative anonymity it offers. Urban life involves interaction with strangers, and this can be an advantage for different reasons:

• For socially oppressed groups like Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, the city may offer some partial protection from the daily humiliation they suffer in the village, where everyone knows their caste identity.
• The anonymity of the city also allows poorer sections of socially dominant rural groups to engage in low-status work that they would not be able to do in the village. …