Insight: Urbanization India Throughout its history, the largest percentage of India’s population has lived in rural areas, but this is rapidly changing as the country is experiencing large scale urban growth. The percentage of India’s population now living in cities is at 31%, which is the highest it has ever been, with an estimated growth to 41% in 2030. As presented in the MPI’s report on the Creative Economy in India, many of these rural areas are under serviced in regards to infrastructure such as electricity, food, and even today basic education. On August 30 2013, our research director Kevin Stolarick presented the results of increasing urbanization in India using night time light (NTL) data at the Thinkers 50 conference in Gurgaon. This Insight will present some of the light data from the accompanying paper entitled The (Current) Extent of India’s Urbanization. Previous MPI Insights have looked at the relationship between Night Time Light (NTL) data and urbanization in Sweden, however the changes in light over time are much more apparent in developing nations such as India. The extent to which India is urbanizing can be seen through the increased population and population densities in many of its cities. This growth is not only happening in cities such as Delhi, but in satellite communities as well, leading to the creation of geographically combined mega regions in which growth in large cities and surrounding communities are merging together. This urbanization can be seen through the growth and intensification of night time lights throughout the country, especially within the large urban agglomerations. Exhibit 1 presents India at night in 1992 and 2010. The data is provided by the U.S. Defense Meteorological Satellite Program’s Operation Linescan System that collects images of the world at night. A full description of this data can be found in the paper’s appendix. For the full insight, please go to: martinprosperity.org/2013/09/12/insight-urbanization-india/
Posted on: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 17:58:40 +0000
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