[As Delhi continues to grow, farmers like Mr. Tomar are likely to have to make a stark decision about their future as developers like Mr. Mittal may soon covet Mr. Tomar’s land. Across the highway from Agraula, Mr. Mittal owns a number of vacant lots in Tronica City, one of the increasingly ubiquitous housing developments just outside Delhi.]
By Max Bearak
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AGRAULA, Uttar Pradesh — As we left New Delhi and approached the border with Uttar Pradesh, Ashok Mittal, who owns and develops property in the latter area, told me, “When we cross over, you won’t just see it. You’ll feel it.” Indeed, as we passed under the sign welcoming us into India’s most populous state, the road dropped by about a foot. Mr. Mittal drove slowly, so as not to damage his undercarriage.
The canal along the road abruptly opened up into a swamp filled with discarded plastic bottles and tobacco packets. Bullock carts, tractors and shared rickshaws dominated the road, which had suddenly become less a road than a teeming bazaar.
This is a different side of urban India, one that exhibits rural characteristics but at high density, in a phenomenon called “rurbanization.”
At the northernmost edge of Delhi’s urban spillover into Uttar Pradesh is Agraula, a prime example of this rural-urban hybrid. Agraula is a small sea of brick-and-mortar buildings that is technically classified as a village, located along the Delhi-Saharanpur highway. It is certainly home to many farms, but also new factories and freeway overpasses.
A decade ago, Agraula was all about agriculture, and Delhi was seemingly a distant place, even though it was only 12 kilometers (seven miles) south. But Delhi has been spreading outward at a rapid pace, and many experts have attributed the expansion to the ban on factories within its borders in 2004 and the rise in demand for suburban housing from those hoping to escape Delhi’s crowded and pricier residential areas. Also, as public transportation upgrades and expands, moving beyond the city’s boundaries and urban tax codes has gradually become more commonplace.
Now Agraula occupies a gray zone between rural and urban that is at once both, and thus neither, providing a paradox for policy thinkers and the central government alike.
The 2011 census saw the unprecedented reclassification of 2,774 rural settlements – many, like Agraula, on the cusp of megacities — into “census towns,” for a total of 3,894. These towns are considered urban for census purposes because they meet three criteria: their population exceeds 5,000, population density is above 400 people per square kilometer, and more than 75 percent of the male workforce is employed outside of agriculture. The size of this category grew more in the last decade than it had in the entire 20th century.
Such reclassification alone accounted for almost a third of the increase in India’s officially recognized urban population since 2001. For the first time since independence, India’s urban population grew more in a decade – adding 91 million people since 2001 for a total of 377 million in 2011 — than its rural population, which grew 90.5 million, for a total of 833 million.
Though census towns clearly exhibit urban characteristics, they continue to be legally administered by panchayats, or rural councils, allowing them to draw on a myriad of government rural development schemes and exempting them from property taxes.
The central government has no plan in place to transition new census towns into its existing urban governance framework. Jairam Ramesh, the minister of rural development, said last month in an interview at his office that this was a phenomenon that the current government was “only acknowledging now.”
“The way we have previously and inadequately defined ‘rural’ is simply as ‘not urban,’ ” he said. “We need to design targeted policy interventions for this type of hybrid zone.”
Despite rapid urbanization, Agraula residents spoke of their lives in terms of both rural privileges and rural grievances, with many saying that meeting urban criteria was irrelevant to their lives. That Delhi has increased fourfold in physical size in the past two decades, stealthily but inevitably enveloping communities like theirs, is a consideration that is still a distant second to their desire for the central government to enhance public infrastructure.
“The problems we faced 30 years ago are the same problems we face today,” lamented Shyoraj Singh Tomar, a farmer from Agraula. “We will go all the way down before seeing any improvement for our future.”
As Delhi continues to grow, farmers like Mr. Tomar are likely to have to make a stark decision about their future as developers like Mr. Mittal may soon covet Mr. Tomar’s land. Across the highway from Agraula, Mr. Mittal owns a number of vacant lots in Tronica City, one of the increasingly ubiquitous housing developments just outside Delhi.
Billboards for these developments promise exotic luxuries like neighborhoods with spaceship themed malls, complete with glass capsule elevators and high-speed escalators. They also promise convenience to Delhiites, and Mr. Mittal said he was certain that the completion of highway improvements linking Tronica to Delhi will precipitate flocks of buyers to the far-flung metropolis-in-waiting.
“You won’t be able to distinguish this from Delhi, eventually,” he said, while standing on the side of one of Tronica’s still-empty roads. Behind him, construction workers on their day off fished with makeshift rods and reels in a roadside swamp, while an egret rustled the tall reeds.
For those who study and create urban planning policy, the fast development of urban frontiers is creating confusion about how the government should handle these areas.
“This last census was a big surprise,” said Ritu Anand, chief economist at the IDFC Foundation and co-author of the first Rural Development Report, which was written with the cooperation with the Ministry of Rural Development and released this year.
“All these new census towns raise the question of who should get jurisdiction over their development and what interventions should be made for their governance,” Ms. Anand said. “We talk all of this fancy stuff about ‘smart cities’ and so on, but as I’m sure you can see in some of these new urbanizations, we’re so far from that.”
Kanhu Charan Pradhan, an urbanization specialist at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, said that he was ambivalent about policy interventions that aim to address so-called “rurban” zones.
Mr. Pradhan, who recently published a study of the new census towns, said conclusions about urbanization trends were difficult to draw from the data because while the census defines urbanizations by its three criteria, each state has the ability to reclassify communities as they see fit.
In one particularly brazen example, the government of Tamil Nadu directed the reclassification of 566 town panchayats back into village panchayats, claiming that “most of the town panchayats are financially weak, and rural in character.”
It also said that town panchayats with a population under 30,000 may be reclassified as village panchayats “so as to enable them to receive more funds from the government of India and state government under various grants and assistance.”
The autonomy of states to define rural and urban, along with the haphazard nature of many areas newly classified as urban, makes for muddy statistical analysis. “We have to accept that we don’t understand India’s urbanization process very well yet,” Mr. Pradhan conceded.
As the central government muddles through the process of determining how to govern the gray zones, workers from near and far will continue to transform Tronica’s towers bit by bit from damp-looking construction skulls into the “homes of dreams” and the “pinnacle of fine living,” as advertised.
Mr. Ramesh, the minister, was bemused at his government’s lateness in addressing “rurbanization.”
“These areas have been neglected for too long. We’ve been fixated on a binary model of rural and urban. In reality, what we have is a continuum.”
Max Bearak is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi.
