MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 49 of 100

Correct — option (1), 'Only a'. Urbanisation is the process by which a growing share of a country's people comes to live in towns and cities, so it is at bottom a movement of population towards urban centres and a rise in the proportion of the population found there. Statement a. describes exactly that: a centralisation, or concentration, of population in the cities. It is worth noting that the definition is about a share rather than about a number. A country whose towns grow while its villages grow just as fast is not urbanising, because the urban proportion has not moved; urbanisation is a redistribution of people between the rural and the urban categories, produced by migration from countryside to town, by the faster natural increase of towns, and by the reclassification of settlements that have acquired urban characteristics. Statement b. asserts the opposite movement. Decentralisation of population away from cities is what happens in suburbanisation and in counter-urbanisation, when people move out of the urban core, and however real those processes are they are not what the word urbanisation means. Statement c. is a contradiction in terms: a concentration of people in villages leaves them in the rural category and therefore does not urbanise anybody. Statement d. is the one that costs marks, because rising density does usually accompany urbanisation and so feels like part of it. But density is a ratio of people to area and it can rise anywhere. A district of dense villages, where population has grown by natural increase without anyone moving to a town, has increasing density and no urbanisation at all — a description that fits large parts of rural India — while a town that spreads outwards as it grows can urbanise its region while its own density falls. Density accompanies urbanisation without defining it, so it does not belong in the answer, and only statement a. survives. This question prints no closing 'which of the statements' line; the four choices follow the statement list directly.

• (2)Only a and b — This option accepts statement a. and then also accepts its exact opposite, which no definition can survive: population cannot both centralise in cities and decentralise from them as the meaning of one word. Statement b. describes suburbanisation, in which people and activity move out of the crowded core to the periphery, and its stronger form counter-urbanisation, in which they leave the metropolitan region altogether — both are studied within urban geography, and both are movements that occur in already urbanised societies, but neither is what urbanisation itself means. A candidate reaches this option by treating a statement list as a collection of things that are true of the topic in general, rather than as candidate definitions of the term in the stem, each of which has to answer the question 'is this what the word means?'
• (3)Only a and d — This is by far the most attractive wrong answer, because statement d. is nearly right and is right in ordinary conversation. Towns are denser than villages, and the growth of towns raises average density in a region, so a candidate who knows the subject well may add it without hesitation. The trouble is that the stem asks what urbanisation means, not what accompanies it, and density fails as a definition in both directions: rural density can rise steadily through natural increase with no urbanisation whatever, and an urbanising region can see density fall in its core as growth spills outwards into suburbs. Density does appear in the official definition of an urban settlement — the Census requires a census town to have at least four hundred persons per square kilometre — but there it is one of three tests alongside a population minimum and a non-agricultural workforce, and being one criterion among several is not the same as being the meaning of the process.
• (4)All of the above — Accepting all four statements requires accepting two that flatly contradict each other, since statement b. reverses statement a., and also accepting statement c., which places the concentration of population in villages and so describes something that is by definition not urbanisation at all. An 'all of the above' choice is a verdict reached by testing every statement and finding no failure, and here two of the four fail immediately on a reading of the words alone, without any knowledge of demography. The presence of a statement and its own negation in the same list is in fact a useful signal: it guarantees that at most one of them can be right and therefore that any option containing both, including the escape option, is unavailable.

Urbanisation is measured as the proportion of a population living in urban areas, which makes the official definition of 'urban' decisive for the number. The Census of India recognises two kinds of urban settlement. The first are statutory towns, which are urban because they have an urban local body — a municipal corporation, a municipality, a cantonment board or a notified town area committee — regardless of their size or their economy. The second are census towns, which have no such body but satisfy three tests at once: a minimum population of five thousand, at least seventy-five per cent of the male main working population engaged in non-agricultural pursuits, and a density of at least four hundred persons per square kilometre. Three processes drive the urban share upwards: migration from village to town, the natural increase of the existing urban population, and the reclassification of settlements that have crossed the census thresholds. The distinction between urbanisation and urban growth is worth holding firmly — urban growth is the increase in the number of urban dwellers, while urbanisation is the increase in their share — because a country can have very rapid urban growth and slow urbanisation if its rural population is growing almost as fast.

MPSC asks urbanisation both as a concept, as here, and as a set of Maharashtra figures, and the two halves support each other. At the 2011 Census 31.16 per cent of India's population was urban, while Maharashtra stood at 45.23 per cent, up from 42.4 per cent in 2001, which makes it one of the more urbanised of the large states and explains why urban administration, municipal finance and city missions occupy so much space in the state's syllabus. On the conceptual side the Commission's favourite device is exactly the one used here: print a definition and then print statements that are true of the neighbourhood of the topic without being the definition. The discipline that defeats it is to read the stem's verb. 'Urbanisation means' asks for the content of a term, so each statement has to be tested by substitution — put the statement in place of the word and ask whether the sentence still says what the word says. Under that test 'increase in density of population' fails at once, because a district of steadily thickening villages satisfies it and is not urbanising.

• Urbanisation is the process by which an increasing proportion of a population comes to live in urban areas; it is a shift in the share of population between rural and urban categories, not merely a growth in the number of town dwellers.
• The three sources of an increasing urban share are migration from rural to urban areas, the natural increase of the existing urban population, and the reclassification of settlements that have acquired urban characteristics.
• The Census of India defines statutory towns by the presence of an urban local body, and census towns by three simultaneous tests: population of at least five thousand, at least seventy-five per cent of male main workers in non-agricultural work, and density of at least four hundred persons per square kilometre.
• At the 2011 Census 31.16 per cent of India's population lived in urban areas, while Maharashtra's urban share was 45.23 per cent, having risen from 42.4 per cent in 2001.
• Rising population density is not the same as urbanisation, since density can increase in rural areas through natural increase alone, and an urbanising region may see density fall in its core as growth spills into the periphery.

• Accepting 'increase in density of population' as the meaning of urbanisation, when rural density can rise without any urbanisation and urban density can fall as a city spreads
• Confusing urbanisation, which is a rise in the urban share, with urban growth, which is a rise in the number of urban residents
• Accepting a statement and its own negation in the same answer, which any list containing both makes impossible
• Treating a statement list as a set of things generally true of the topic rather than as candidate definitions to be substituted into the stem

Urbanisation reaches MPSC papers in three forms. The first is definitional, as here, and is answered by testing each statement as a substitute for the term. The second is factual, asking for the urban share of India or of Maharashtra at a particular Census, for the number of million-plus cities, or for the most and least urbanised districts of the state. The third is administrative, moving from urbanisation into urban local government, the 74th Amendment and the central urban missions. Because Maharashtra is among the most urbanised large states, the Commission returns to this territory often, and holding the 2011 figures for both India and the state, together with the Census definition of an urban area, covers most of what the factual variants can ask.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  According to the Census of India, a settlement without an urban local body is classified as a census town only if it satisfies which of the following sets of conditions ?

  • (a)A population of at least 5,000 alone
  • (b)A population of at least 5,000, at least 75 per cent of male main workers in non-agricultural pursuits, and a density of at least 400 persons per square kilometre
  • (c)A density of at least 400 persons per square kilometre alone
  • (d)The presence of a municipal corporation or a cantonment board

  Answer(b) A population of at least 5,000, at least 75 per cent of male main workers in non-agricultural pursuits, and a density of at least 400 persons per square kilometre — all three tests must be met at once for a census town. A settlement that has a municipal corporation, municipality, cantonment board or notified town area committee is a statutory town instead, and is urban by virtue of that body whatever its size or occupational structure.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  A district in which the rural population grows steadily through natural increase, with no migration to towns and no settlement crossing the Census thresholds, will show which of the following ?

  • (a)Rising population density but no urbanisation
  • (b)Rising urbanisation but no change in density
  • (c)Both rising density and rising urbanisation
  • (d)Neither rising density nor rising urbanisation

  Answer(a) Rising population density but no urbanisation — density is simply people divided by area and rises whenever numbers grow within the same territory, whereas urbanisation requires the share of population living in urban areas to increase. This is the clearest demonstration that increasing density cannot serve as the definition of urbanisation, however often the two rise together.