What makes a place a city? For most of us, the look, form and feel of any settlement give that impression. In India, the census office has long defined it, a practice rooted in colonial times. When the British began counting India in 1872, they counted not only people but also decided a town’s taxonomic character. By 1891, the rule was simple and administrative : a municipality, a cantonment, or a continuous group of houses inhabited by at least 5,000 people. The country was split into two categories, urban and rural. Whatever did not fit the urban category was considered rural.

The idea was that a town is a fixed place with clear borders, and that a village is simply whatever is left over. In the post-independence scenario, especially since 1961, the census kept the 5,000-population threshold intact while adding population density and the proportion of the population working outside agriculture. Subsequently, each census kept these numbers without questioning the idea behind them. Now here lies the real dilemma. While statutory cities are established by law, the number game is applied to administrative villages, turning them into symbolic cities, that is census towns.

Today, a village is counted as a ‘Census Town’ if it passes three tests. It must have at least 5,000 people. It must have at least 400 people per square kilometre. And three out of every four working men, who must have worked for at least 6 months, must be engaged in non-agricultural work. The idea was to recognise villages that had started to look and work like towns, even though the State government had not made them municipalities. To this end, between 2001 and 2011 the number of Census Towns nearly tripled, from about 1,362 to 3,894. Researchers found that approximately one-third of India’s urban growth in that decade came not from growing cities, but from villages being moved, figuratively, from rural to urban.

This escalated........

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