Dynamics of Urban Growth in Eastern India

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In popular understanding the phenomenon of growing urbanization means concentration of people in towns and cities. This process has gone on in every region and country as people, leaving primary activities, flocked to convenient central places for earning a living through secondary occupations like trade, commerce and later, industry. The classical example of such a process is seen in Great Britain and Western Europe. The fillip to the growth of such centres of human concentration began with trade and commerce and matured with industrial development.

In the Third World, where industrial development was slow, as in India, urbanization saw growth of towns in a scattered and disjointed manner and such urban centres appeared as islands in a sea of agriculture, forestry, fishing and so on.

As a demographic process urbanization involves the appearance of towns and cities growing in relative size within a space economy with an increasing proportion of the population concentrating in small and large urban settlements.

In eastern India, urban development basically followed the trade routes, first the Ganga river route, then the railway route through Raniganj westward.

The six categories of Census towns in eastern India have different locational, occupational and demographic characteristics which, studied together, give a comprehensive idea of the socio- economic base of the region.

The emergence of Calcutta, the giant city, and its conurbation, calls for an in-depth study of its location, its growth dynamics and its internal socio-economic configurations.

When Job Charnok selected the site of Calcutta as a centre for his trading activities, little did he imagine that three hundred years after its foundation it would turn into a giant urban complex withFew parallels. The irony of history has turned Calcutta into a frontier settlement of enormous size with associated problems of cross migration. A metropolis, a gateway city, a decaying port, a melting pot of heterogeneous languages and cultures all these characteristics gave Calcutta its many problems as well as its enormous vitality to overcome them.

The essays included in this book were written over a considerable period but they were all directed to understand a city and its fight for existence with endless courage.

**Contents and Sample Pages**