The Census 2027 offers a unique opportunity for revisiting the parameters and indicators for demarcation of rural and urban areas in India.

In fact, the policies for rural and urban development in the past have not been appropriately aligned with the real time availability of physical and spatial infrastructure and social services in these areas. Availability of these real data based parameters would create enabling ecosystem to catalyse rapid socio-economic transformation of rural and urban areas.

Firstly, what exactly constitutes rural and urban areas is important. A natural definition of rurality is to define it by exclusion, as that which is not urban, where urban is defined on the basis of population agglomerations.

In the 2011 Census, the definition of urban area adopted is as follows:

(a) All statutory places with a municipality, corporation, cantonment board or notified town area committee, etc.

(b) A place satisfying the following three criteria simultaneously:

(i) a minimum population of 5,000;

(ii) at least 75 per cent of male working population engaged in non-agricultural pursuits; and

(iii) a density of population of at least 400 per sq. km. (1,000 per sq. mile).

An area is considered ‘Rural’ if it is not classified as ‘Urban’ as per the above definition.

The existing urban-rural classification systems suffer from significant deficiencies as they do not help in formulation of development indicators which can be used for identifying and delineating development deficits.

Policies and programmes can be better targeted when rural and urban definitions are combined with key demographic, economic, educational, or health care provider characteristics.

Data used to conceptualize the rural definition in India have no direct and corresponding relationship with rural development policy formulation. Rurality is merely a construct that does not stand-up to empirical testing.

Some countries consider the availability of services for defining urban area.

Global examples

In Honduras, for instance, an area is considered urban if it has 2,000 residents and is equipped with infrastructure for health, education, and electricity. This definition is relevant from the standpoint of poverty analysis because poverty is usually associated with the absence of these services.

Using variables like population density and the distance to a major city, a Latin American rurality metric was developed.

Limited, exclusionary conceptualisations of urban and rural boundaries fail to measure socio-economic realities.

Overcoming contradictions and attaining complementarity will be made possible only by reorienting policies around an awareness of socioeconomic trends as well as widely recognised developmental approaches and concepts.

Poverty rates are positively associated with greater rural distances from successively larger metropolitan areas. More remote rural communities have more inelastic labour supply, hitting growth and development.

Welfare decreases rapidly as access to urban centres gets worse. Thus, understanding the spatial dimension of socio-economic processes in rural areas is important.

Broader definition

Policy formulation for rural development would become more effective if we adopt a broader definition of rural area by including population data as well as status of physical, economic and social infrastructures that are necessary for poverty reduction and for living a dignified life. There is perhaps an urgent need to revise the static concept of rurality and develop a dynamic definition of rural area which should be reviewed periodically.

Policymakers should identify the demographic and economic changes which affect the character of a rural area. Rural development should focus on people-based policies, relying on spatial equilibrium processes.

The writer was with the National Institute of Rural Development & Panchayati Raj (NIRDPR), Hyderabad

Published on June 25, 2025