Why in the News?

India still focuses its urban future on megacities, even though only about 500 towns are large cities, while nearly 9,000 are small towns, most with populations below one lakh. Earlier, urbanisation was led mainly by metros, but this pattern is now changing. Small towns are increasingly absorbing surplus labour, migrant workers, and consumption activities as metros face high land prices, stressed infrastructure, and rising living costs. This shift reflects not inclusive growth, but the spread of urban crisis to smaller towns, with serious economic and social consequences.

How have India’s small towns proliferated since the 1970s?

1. Metropolitan Concentration: Organised capital accumulation during the 1970s-1990s prioritised large cities as centres of industry, infrastructure, and state investment.
2. Labour Absorption: Cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, and later Bengaluru and Hyderabad absorbed surplus labour and expanded consumption.
3. Spatial Fix: Metros functioned as spatial fixes for capitalism by enabling accumulation through land, infrastructure, and labour concentration.

Why are India’s metros facing a crisis of over-accumulation today?

1. Land Detachment: Land prices have become disconnected from productive economic use.
2. Infrastructure Stress: Urban systems are stretched beyond functional limits.
3. Cost Escalation: Rising housing and living costs have become unaffordable for working groups.
4. Accumulation Limits: Metros have exhausted their capacity to absorb surplus capital and labour efficiently.

Why have small towns emerged as new sites of urbanisation?

1. Capital Redirection: Small towns offer cheaper land and lower entry barriers for capital.
2. Labour Availability: They absorb migrants displaced from metros and rural youth exiting agrarian livelihoods.
3. Functional Integration: Towns such as Sattenapalle (Andhra Pradesh), Dhamtari (Chhattisgarh), Barabanki (Uttar Pradesh), Hassan (Karnataka), Bongaigaon (Assam), and Una (Himachal Pradesh) now act as logistics nodes, agro-processing hubs, warehouse towns, service centres, and consumption markets.

How are small towns embedded within the urban process?

1. Urban Continuum: Small towns operate fully within urban capitalist systems rather than existing as rural-urban intermediaries.
2. Regulatory Gaps: Weaker regulation and minimal political scrutiny facilitate capital expansion.
3. Cost Arbitrage: Lower land prices and pliable labour make small towns attractive for accumulation under stress conditions.

Are small towns a better alternative to metropolitan urbanisation?

1. No Emancipatory Promise: The article rejects the notion that small towns ensure inclusive or equitable growth.
2. Urbanisation of Poverty: What unfolds is the relocation of rural deprivation into urban spaces.
3. Informal Labour Dominance: Construction workers without contracts, women in home-based work, and youth in platform economies face insecurity and lack of social protection.
4. Emerging Hierarchies: Towns such as Bhadol (Madhya Pradesh) and Raichur (Karnataka) show consolidation of power among real estate brokers, contractors, micro-financiers, and local intermediaries controlling land and labour.

What does this reveal about India’s urban policy framework?

1. Metro-Centric Bias: Flagship urban missions remain focused on large cities.
2. Policy Failure: Small towns remain under-governed despite being central to contemporary urbanisation.
3. Political Neglect: Absence of adequate scrutiny deepens informalisation and inequality.

Conclusion

India’s small towns are not emerging as alternatives to the metropolitan crisis but as its extension. They represent a new spatial frontier for capitalist accumulation under stress, marked by informal labour, weak regulation, and entrenched local hierarchies. Without policy recalibration, small-town urbanisation risks reproducing the very inequalities it was expected to resolve.

PYQ Relevance

[UPSC 2024] Why do large cities tend to attract more migrants than smaller towns? Discuss in the light of conditions in developing countries.

Linkage: The question examines structural drivers of rural-urban migration in developing countries. It connects with debates on metro-centric growth, over-accumulation, and the emerging role of small towns as secondary but constrained urban destinations.

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