Lack of infrastructure: Will big census towns benefit from the 'Rurban' Mission?

Dalip Singh of Delhi stumbles upon the same dilemma every time he prints his visiting cards: what address should he give his optical shop? No local authority has given him any shop number. Nor does the lane in front of his shop bear any name or number.

If a potential customer calls him up, Singh directs him to a bylane next to the post office located in North Delhi’s Burari Gaon. But Singh, like 1.46 lakh other Burari residents, does not make a fuss over the lack of such basic conveniences. There is, after all, an upside to the gaon (village) tag: it ensures that Singh pays very little for his water and zilch as house tax. What is more, he is licensed to raise a floor or two of his residence without taking permission from any government agencies.


Welcome to Burari Gaon which, like 3,893 other urban settlements, displays visible characteristics like a large population and predominantly non-agricultural economic activity. Yet, the office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner prefers to classify them as “census towns”. The respective state governments too have not bestowed the urban tag to them as yet. Not even to 20 of such ‘towns’ — including Noida, Greater Noida, Khora (all in Uttar Pradesh), Navi Mumbai Panvel Raigarh and Burari in Delhi — that have a population of over a lakh. That these are still towns means that they do not qualify for aid from the union urban development ministry; instead, what they get is a handful of rural development sops.

Rakesh Gupta, a resident of Khora, sums up the problems a typical census town faces: “There is no health centre here. There is just one school, that too a primary one. There is no park here. No one knows the status of our town. It’s an urban area, but we have a panchayat. No resident here qualifies to get bank loans and credit cards.”

Urban Confusion

According to the 2011 census report, Khora in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad district (in the vicinity of the national capital) is the eighth largest census town in India with a population of 1.9 lakh. As no building regulations are applicable here, residents have happily constructed four storeys on plots as small as 15 to 25 square yards.

Former urban development secretary M Ramachandran who recently edited a book titled India’s Urban Confusion has described the phenomenon of census towns as a classic case of urban confusion. “The census towns will someday become statutory towns. But the tragic reality is that the state governments have allowed those to grow in a haphazard manner. You won’t find proper sewerage, drainage or street lights in most of these towns. There is no regulation in building norms there,” he says.

Since census towns are yet to be declared statutory towns by the state governments, the upshot is that they are villages, and hence are eligible to avail of rural development ministry schemes. The UPA government had announced that some of the census towns would be handpicked for holistic development under a scheme called PURA, or Provision of Urban Amenities in Rural Areas, originally a brainchild of former President of India APJ Abdul Kalam.

Under the scheme, which never quite took off, a private bidder was to identify a gram panchayat or a census town with a population of 25,000 to 40,000 and develop it in public-private partnership mode.

Sorry State of Affairs

The NDA government is likely to subsume PURA in a more ambitious mission called Rurban (rural plus urban), which is likely to be rolled out in a month. A panel headed by the rural development ministry’s additional secretary SM Vijayanand has been designing the new scheme. “Yes, census towns will be major beneficiaries under the Rurban Mission,” says a rural development ministry joint secretary declining to go into the contours of the new scheme. But if President Pranab Mukherjee’s address to Parliament in June was any indication, Rurban Mission would provide urban amenities to rural areas while preserving the ethos of villages.


Though some of the 3,894 census towns are bound to be covered under this ambitious scheme, it is unlikely that all big census towns (12 out of the top 20 fall within the National Capital Territory of Delhi) will benefit from this move, according to people familiar with the matter. Most of the big census towns are in the vicinity of big cities, and the census towns coming under NCT of Delhi even elect their representatives to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD). Yet, none of those has been notified as urban areas as yet. KP Singh, a resident of Burari, says: “Many here don’t want Burari to be a fully urban area as it were will force them to pay property tax. Also, water will get costlier then.” Singh runs a fodder shop in the locality, but the dwindling number of buffalos in the area has hit his daily sales — that’s perhaps one indicator of Burari’s transformation from a rural pocket to a full-blown urban area.

Burari, Khora and most other census towns paint a sorry picture of India’s transition from rural to an urban economy. According to the 2011 census, 37.7 crore people out of India’s population of 121 crore live in urban areas alone. In other words, every third Indian now lives in an urban area — a city or a town or a census town. But the importance of the people living in urban areas can’t be undermined, as urban people — roughly 31% of the total population — contribute as high as 60% of India’s GDP, according to estimates by the urban development ministry. And it’s projected that urban India will contribute 75% of India’s GDP in the next 15 years. But the growth in census towns — an increase of 2,532 between 2001 and 2011 — indicates the size and scale of this massive problem that governments have conveniently ignored for years.

Residents Not in a Hurry

Urban development ministry joint secretary Neeraj Mandloi acknowledges that the failure to bring census towns into the urban ambit is the root cause of today’s urban woes. “From the urban development ministry perspective, we want more and more densely populated village areas to come into the urban fold. For that, states have to notify those as towns. That will ensure planned infrastructure development and regularisation of land use policy,” says Mandloi.

After all, the urban development ministry can’t implement its scheme in an urban area until the state government concerned notifies it as one. For example, Noida and Greater Noida, two bright spots among the large census towns in India, had to be left out of the ambit of the urban development ministry’s earlier flagship project, the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), which envisaged the creation of urban infrastructure worth about Rs 1 lakh crore across 65 cities. The two key planned cities of Uttar Pradesh did not qualify for JNNURM largesse as they do not have elected urban local bodies. Result? Whilst JNNURM buses are visible in virtually every nook and corner of India, Noida and Greater Noida are still grappling with basic public transport.

Urban expert OP Agarwal, formerly with the World Bank’s urban transport department, says lack of a policy to address census towns is giving birth to unplanned urbanisation. “At the transition stage, it is important to start a formal planning process so that the town does not grow haphazardly. It is true that the benefits available under the rural development programmes get lost, but the government needs to start a programme for supporting such transitional villages so that good planning starts at an early stage,” he says.

For their part, residents in such transitional areas are in no hurry to push for converting their census towns into full-fledged towns. After all, the conversion would mean losing rural development schemes and paying more taxes.

Yet, young residents have a different take. “I don’t mind paying a little extra if I can get a better lifestyle,” says 21-year-old Sagar (who goes by his first name) who learnt photography before starting a studio in Khora. The civil servants and urban experts blueprinting the Modi Sarkar’s smart city mission must factor in the aspirations of Sagar and his ilk.