In my SK Dey Centenary Memorial Lecture in 2006, at the National Institute of Rural Development, I had argued that urbanisation in Gujarat was clearly underestimated. There were more than 122 large villages in Gujarat in 2001, which had, according to the 2001 Census, all the characteristics of towns but were not measured as such. The actual growth of urbanisation was around 5% and not half of that. We were right. In Gujarat, urbanisation went up from 37.4% in 2001 to 42.6% in 2011, not in line with official projections at 40.4%. For the country as a whole, we have argued that we are underestimating the needs of 10% of the labour force, which will move in addition to the official estimates from the rural to urban continuum. This number is 40 million people.
I am not quite clear why the rural-urban breakup of the population is not included in the preliminary results declared by the Census for all the states. But Gujarat and Kerala have done so on April 1, 2011. In Gujarat, the urban population was 42.6% of the total population, around 2.57 crore persons. But the projections of the urban population by the Technical Group on Population Projections after the 2001 Census was 2.4 crore and so, for almost a decade, we have made policies ignoring around two million people and their needs in Gujarat. The only other state that has released rural-urban figures is Kerala, which also has a highly decentralised pattern of habitation, as in, and actually more so than, Gujarat. Here, the missing rural-urban continuum is more serious. The projected urban population was 25.4% in 2011, the actual figure is 47.7%. We make such horrendous mistakes in policies on account of an inability to catch major societal trends and make policies in a knowledgeable manner. For the country as a whole, I have argued, in an invited contribution to the Planning Commission?s journal Yojana on the Twelfth Plan, that we are underestimating the needs of 10% of the labour force, which will move additionally to the official estimates from rural to the urban continuum. The only other person I know with influence who has argued similarly is the Amul Baby, Rahul Gandhi, who, in an intervention in an IRMA meeting, said that we are ignoring the needs of millions who are moving from villages to towns.
In technical literature and our columns, we have argued that urbanisation in India is being underestimated, and projected that the rural population share will go down to 58% in 2020 and 55% in 2025, compared to the official projection of 68% in 2020 and 64% in 2025. The numbers used in so-called authoritative articles by consulting groups, Plan documents and mandated institutes are wrong for 2011 and 2015.
Rural population in 2020 will be closer to 738 million, out of the total population of 1,273 million. The Eleventh Plan projected the rural labour force as 45.7% by 2016-17, the last year for which they have given projections. The rural workforce will also be much lower than the figure of 404 million estimated for 2020 and similar figures for earlier years, on account of a much lower estimate of urbanisation.
When you grow at 7% in per capita terms, you need a lot of agricultural, rural products and services. The farmer will provide them and move to the markets to sell. Will we develop the market towns, roads, communication links, skills, health facilities, financial products and a lot else with which the farmer will do this or will we leave him (her) to the capricious mercies of the market, a great hand-maiden but a cruel master if the lessons of economic history and our own freedom movement are to be believed? The two very popular ideas that employment in crop production is not falling and urbanisation is not rising fast in India are incorrect.
The period of high growth in India is that of problems and opportunities. This was bound to be so as it was a period of transition in a rural-urban continuum. Change was inevitable and fast and the only question was if it would be benign or of the cruel kind in the early history of the industrial revolution. Millions of farmers, agricultural workers and artisans were moving from smaller villages to larger villages, from larger villages to smaller towns and from there to larger towns. They were doing so for better opportunities and that was good. If we create institutions to support them, the process would be benign, otherwise the transition would inevitably take place but it would be of a cruel kind. The numbers our policymakers use are moving to the bad options.
The author is a former Union minister
