New hot spots on population radar

MUMBAI: The Shiv Sena, whose biggest plaint is that Mumbai is being crushed by migration, should take comfort from this little fact—India''s metros are no longer the population boom towns.
Although the big cities continue to record the highest numbers, a look at United Nations population projections show that the highest annual growth rates today are not even in second-rung cities like Pune or Coimbatore but in smaller cities like Latur, Surat and Tirupur and the peripheral towns of the everexpanding Delhi region.
The 2001 census tells us that India''s urban population is now 28 per cent, up from 17 per centin 1950, and projected to increase to almost 40 per centin the next 30 years.
But most of this growth will now be in the smaller cities of theClass I category or towns with over one lakh population (the share of this category is now 65 per cent compared to 25 per cent in 1901).
"It''s scarcely surprising," says AshishBose, demographer and vice-president of the National Institute of Urban Affairs.
"When the big cities grow so much that they become unlivable, as all the metros are today, the growth spills into smaller cities like Meerut and Faridabad, and later when these have crossed into the millions, the growth will shift even further down to the class II and III cities, which have less than a lakh of population."
Some of the smaller, high-growth settlements, of course, are in the periphery of the bigger ones.
Delhi is the best example of this, as the urban agglomerate''s average annual growth rate between 2000 and 2005 was 4 per cent— compared to Mumbai''s 2.6 per cent and Bangalore''s 3.2 per cent—-partly due to an explosion in its feeder towns, Noida and Ghaziabad, which had the highest growth rates in the country at 6.96 per cent ad 6.38 per cent respectively.
"If you take the dormitory towns into account, then the urban agglomerate growth may be higher than we think," notes Bose.
Even in the Mumbai region, Bhiwandi has one of the higher growth rates of 4.4 per cent but this is a huge drop from the 12 per cent growth rate it experienced through the ''70s and the ''80s.
The challenge of urbanisation may therefore lie in both the small towns and the urbanised corridors that build up between cities, like the Mumbai-Pune stretch or to look at a global example, Washington-Boston.