The idea of 'Rurbanization' was elaborated by which one of the following sociologists ?

Question

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Correct — D, G. S. Ghurye. Govind Sadashiv Ghurye (1893–1983), who headed the sociology department at the University of Bombay and is conventionally called the father of Indian sociology, elaborated the rurban idea in his study Anatomy of a Rururban Community (1963), which followed his earlier survey of the same settlement, After a Century and a Quarter: Lonikand Then and Now (1960). The idea itself is simple and important: between the self-contained village and the industrial city lies a large class of settlements that are neither — places with urban occupations, urban services and urban contacts but a still-rural social structure. Ghurye's argument was that Indian society should be read as a rural–urban continuum rather than a rural/urban dichotomy, because caste, kinship and ritual travel with people into towns instead of dissolving at the city boundary. One honest qualification the exam does not ask for but a student should carry: the term 'rurban' was not coined in India. It goes back to the American rural sociologist Charles J. Galpin in the early twentieth century and was developed further by Sorokin and Zimmerman; Ghurye is the scholar who elaborated it for Indian conditions, which is exactly what the question asks.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Yogendra Singh's contribution is the study of social change in India through the framework of tradition and modernity — his best-known work is Modernization of Indian Tradition, which analyses how modernising forces interact with the older hierarchical, holistic and continuous structure of Indian tradition. That is a theory of change, not a theory of settlement types, and rurbanization is not his idea.  (b) Herbert Spencer was a nineteenth-century English social theorist known for the organic analogy — society compared to a living organism with differentiated parts — and for the evolutionary 'survival of the fittest' strain of thought later labelled social Darwinism. He wrote about the general evolution of societies from simple to complex, not about Indian settlements, and the rurban concept has no place in his work. His presence here is the standard trick of dropping one Western classical theorist among Indian sociologists.  (c) The most tempting wrong answer, because M. N. Srinivas is the sociologist most associated with the Indian village. But his enduring concepts are Sanskritisation (a lower caste raising its ritual status by adopting the practices of a higher one), Westernisation and the dominant caste — ideas about mobility and power inside the village, not about the blurring of the rural–urban boundary. Srinivas studied villages; Ghurye is the one who elaborated the rurban category.

Concept: Classical sociology treated 'rural' and 'urban' as two opposed types of community — the village as small, homogeneous, face-to-face and tradition-bound, the city as large, heterogeneous, impersonal and specialised. The rurban idea rejects that clean split. It says settlements lie along a continuum: a small town with a bus service, a degree college, a mandi and a daily flow of commuters to a nearby city is functionally urban in its economy while remaining rural in its social organisation. G. S. Ghurye elaborated this for India, arguing that urbanisation here does not erase caste and kinship but carries them into the town, so the sharp rural/urban dichotomy borrowed from Western sociology fits India badly. The idea matters beyond theory, because India's census recognises 'census towns' — places that meet urban criteria of size, density and non-agricultural employment without ever being notified as towns — and these are the rurban settlements in administrative form.

State PCS 2022 Q61 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q61 — Economy PYQ with Answer