Punjab fast shedding the rural tag: Census

Friday, 10/08/2012

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Chandigarh: Fast shedding its rural tag, Punjab has begun to wear an increasingly urban look. The urban growth has outpaced rural growth. This noticeable bias in the border state’s growth towards urbanization has been revealed in the rural-urban population report of Census 2011 released here, on Thursday.

In the past decade (2001-2011), the agrarian state has grown by 25.72 per cent and the urban growth rate was twice of 13.73 pc overall growth rate and thrice of 7.58 pc rural growth rate, disclosed Census

Director Seema Jain. The change in urbanisation level ranking has been more conspicuous in Bathinda, Mohali and Gurdaspur districts. Bathinda with 35.99 pc urban populace has improved its rank from ninth to sixth, Mohali with 55.17 pc from fourth to second and Gurdaspur with 28.5 pc moved from 14th to 12th position.

Even as Ludhiana, popularly known as the Manchester of India, emerged as the most urbanized city, where one out of every five urban dwellers of Punjab resides, Amritsar which was only Class I town with over 1 lakh population in 1901, registered the lowest growth among corporation towns.

With 37.49 pc urban population, Punjab registered 25.72 pc growth rate during the decade. However, spatial disparities in urbanization levels were evident from the fact that Ludhiana, Mohali, Amritsar and Jalandhar have more than half of their population living in urban areas, and these four predominantly urban districts constitute 49.12 pc of state’s entire urban population.

Jain disclosed that Punjab accounts for 2.75 pc of India’s urban population and 2.08 pc of rural population. Though the transition from rural to urban is relatively fast, still 62.51 pc population is rural and 37.49 pc urban. The number of census houses in the state has increased from 59.7 lakh in 2001 to 78.5 lakh in 2011, exhibiting an increase of 31.5 pc. Here also, 39.6 pc houses were added in cities while villages added 26.5 pc houses.

Emerging as one of the more urbanised areas of the country, even the least urbanized district Tarn Taran with 12.63 pc urban populace, is more urbanised than the overall urbanisation level of Bihar (11.3 pc) and Himachal Pradesh (10.04 pc). With the number of towns up from 157 to 217, three-fourths (74.24 pc) of the urban population in Punjab is residing in Class I and Class II towns.

Interestingly, the urbanisation level in tracts of Malwa, Doaba and Majha is nearly the same.