Over-urbanisation names a mismatch. A country is said to be over-urbanised when the proportion of its population living in cities is higher than its level of industrialisation, per capita income and infrastructural provision would lead one to expect. The city grows, but the productive base that historically justified urban growth does not grow with it, so the newcomers are lodged in the city without being incorporated into its economy. The condition is one of absorption without incorporation.

The term is comparative and therefore always implies a benchmark. In its original use the benchmark was the historical experience of Western Europe and North America, where the movement of people into towns tracked the movement of labour into factories. Where that correspondence fails — where a fifth or a third of a population is urban while manufacturing employs a small fraction — the urbanisation is judged to have outrun its economic foundation.

Distinguishing three terms

Urbanisation is simply the rising share of population living in settlements classified as urban, together with the spread of urban occupations and ways of life. It is a neutral demographic and ecological process.

Over-urbanisation adds a normative comparison: the urban share is excessive relative to industrial employment and civic capacity. The diagnosis is about proportion, not size — a small city can be over-urbanised and a very large one need not be.

Pseudo-urbanisation shifts attention from economy to culture and function. Here settlements are counted as urban, and swell in population, without acquiring urban functions or an urban social order: migrants reconstitute village neighbourhoods, caste and kin networks inside the city, occupations remain petty and traditional, and the settlement is a demographic aggregation rather than an urban community. Answers that treat the three as synonyms lose marks; the useful formulation is that over-urbanisation concerns an economic deficit and pseudo-urbanisation a functional and cultural one.

Push, pull and the composition of migration

The classical account of urban growth was a story of pull — rising factory wages drawing labour out of agriculture. Over-urbanisation reverses the emphasis towards push: fragmentation of holdings, indebtedness, tenancy insecurity, drought and the absence of non-farm work expel people from the countryside regardless of whether the city has anything for them. Migration then registers rural distress rather than urban opportunity, which is why it continues during periods of urban stagnation.

The distinction should not be pressed too hard. Push and pull operate together, information travels along caste and village networks that make particular destinations attractive, and much movement is temporary. Natural increase within cities, and the reclassification of settlements as urban, also contribute to urban growth quite apart from migration — a point on which the concept's critics have insisted.

Consequences

Where employment cannot expand fast enough, the surplus is taken up by the informal sector: street vending, head loading, waste picking, domestic service, petty repair and construction labour, paid by the day and unprotected by law. Work is found, income is not. Housing follows the same logic, producing slums, squatter settlements and pavement dwelling on land that is unserviced and often legally insecure, so that residents are vulnerable to demolition as well as to disease.

Municipal services scale worst of all. Water supply, drainage, sanitation, solid waste management, schools and transport are planned against projected populations and financed from a narrow local tax base, and they fail unevenly — adequately in planned colonies, hardly at all in the settlements that grew fastest. The resulting spatial inequality is what gives Indian metropolitan life its characteristic juxtaposition of high-rise and hutment on adjacent plots.

Davis and Golden, and their critics

The formulation belongs to Kingsley Davis and Hilda Hertz Golden (1954), who compared levels of urbanisation with levels of economic development across countries and identified a set of pre-industrial societies whose urban populations exceeded what their economies appeared to support. Bert Hoselitz applied the argument to Asia, adding that such cities could be parasitic rather than generative — consuming the rural surplus without stimulating rural productivity.

The concept was attacked almost at once. N. V. Sovani (1964) argued that the correlation between urbanisation and industrialisation derived from a handful of Western cases and could not serve as a norm, that the choice of index determined the verdict, and that calling a country over-urbanised said nothing about what should be done. The deeper objection is that the concept smuggles in a Western industrial standard of correct development, treating the European sequence as natural and every deviation as pathological. Later scholarship preferred to describe what actually happens — informal livelihoods, circular movement, peri-urban expansion — rather than measuring it against a norm it was never going to meet.

The Indian metropolis

India illustrates the argument without settling it. Mumbai drew labour to its cotton mills, retained and expanded that labour after the mills closed following the strike of 1982, and now houses a very large share of its residents in slums while its financial and service economy employs relatively few of them. Kolkata's bustees absorbed refugee and rural populations far beyond the capacity of its industrial base; Delhi's growth has been driven as much by administration, construction and services as by manufacturing. At the same time, circular migration means that many of those counted as urban poor are not permanently urban at all, which cuts against any simple reading of the figures.

For the UPSC answer

Define over-urbanisation as a disproportion between urban population and industrial-infrastructural capacity, and separate it explicitly from urbanisation and pseudo-urbanisation in your opening lines. Attribute the formulation to Davis and Golden, extend it through Hoselitz's parasitic city, and give Sovani's critique real space — the concept's ethnocentrism and its dependence on the chosen index are the discriminating points. Illustrate with Mumbai's slums and informal employment, then qualify the concept by noting that natural increase, reclassification and circular migration all complicate the migration-driven story.

References & further reading

  1. Davis, K. and Golden, H. H. (1954). Urbanization and the Development of Pre-Industrial Areas. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 3(1).
  2. Hoselitz, B. F. (1957). Urbanization and Economic Growth in Asia. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 6(1).
  3. Sovani, N. V. (1964). The Analysis of Over-Urbanization. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 12(2).
  4. Breese, G. (1966). Urbanization in Newly Developing Countries. Prentice-Hall.
  5. Bose, A. (1978). India's Urbanization 1901–2001. Tata McGraw-Hill.
  6. Ramachandran, R. (1989). Urbanization and Urban Systems in India. Oxford University Press.