Urbanization means
a. Centralization of population in the cities
b. Decentralization of population in the cities
c. Centralization of population in villages
d. Increase in density of population

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

Why the other options are wrong — (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?'  (c) 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.  (d) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2023 Q49 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q49 — Economy PYQ with Answer