This essay is meant to sum up and bring the forum on the State of the Cities: India Report (SOCR) to a close. The previous essays have introduced the SOCR and complemented it with observations and perspectives of a distinguished panel of international experts, made initially at a webinar held under the auspices of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy (University of Toronto) and subsequently scripted for the Urban Affairs Forum.

Our understanding of Indian urbanization is as amorphous as the sprawling megacities, mofussil towns and quasi-urban rural settlements that constitute it. Characterised simultaneously as too fast and too slow, as ‘messy’ yet dynamic, ‘hidden’ yet self-evident, urbanization in India is assumed to be transformative yet found to be insufficiently so.  What’s actually going on here?

One of the major contributions of the report is that it questions the meaning of “the urban” and demonstrates the complexity in the measures of urbanization. From large cities to urban peripheries to census towns, the different forms of spatiality have different logics of growth and present different answers to the central question: How urban is India? 

The question I pose here, while inspired by Prof. Mathur’s provocation, is, however, slightly different. What I wish to ask is whether Indian cities are truly urban. What do I mean by that? I mean that urbanization is usually associated with social emancipation and political agency and economic progress. It is for these qualities that the process of urban transformation is imbricated with not just growth, but development, the reason why it is so desired and also the reason why it is resisted. How do Indian cities fare on these metrics?

The study emphasizes two points of interest in this connection. First, as in most countries, most attention has been paid to big metropolitan urban areas on one hand and poor rural areas on the other hand.  However, as this study shows, a large and increasing share of urban development in India has been in smaller cities and in areas classified as rural. Second, there are huge differences between states and also, though this is not as emphasized, within states.

Urbanization – irrespective of how it may be defined, interpreted, or perceived, has acquired a “space” for itself in India’s development trajectory. Consisting of 7,933 cities and towns of different population sizes and a population of 377.1 million persons (2011 census) – comparable to that of China for that year – India has the second largest system in the world. At current urban population growth rates, India’s urban population, according to the United Nations, will reach a high of 857 million by the year 2050 AD!

The forum starts here with an introduction of the webinar event by Bharat Punjabi, followed by an overview of the SOCR by the lead author of the report, Om Prakash Mathur. The following essays by Jan Nijman, Richard Bird, Partha Mukhopadhyay, Yue Zhang, and Shahana Chattaraj provide reflections on the SOCR and India’s urbanization from an interdisciplinary perspective. The forum concludes with Om Prakash Mathur’s response to some of the questions raised by the panelists. In publishing this forum, we hope to invite more scholarly debates on global urbanization, especially the drastic urban transformation in the Global South.