Summary

This summary draws together the chapter on population and human settlements: how India's population has grown, where people live and why, what the population is made of, why people migrate, and how villages, towns and cities form, grow and affect the environment.

India's population passed 121 crore (1.21 billion) at the 2011 Census: about 17.5% of the world's people on 2.4% of its land, with an average density of 382 persons per sq km. Growth went through four phases, from near-stagnation before 1921 to the rapid "population explosion" after 1951 and slower growth since 1981, a pattern explained by the demographic transition. Population is unevenly spread because of relief, climate, water, soils and economic opportunity, and it is described by its age and sex structure, literacy, rural–urban split and occupations. Migration moves people between villages and towns in response to push and pull factors. Settlements range from clustered and dispersed villages to towns, cities and megacities; rapid urbanisation brings jobs and services but also slums, congestion and pollution, so planning for sustainable settlements is essential.

Chapter Summary: Population and Human Settlements

Population: Size and Growth

• At the 2011 Census, India had 1,210.9 million people (just over 121 crore), about 17.5% of the world's population on only 2.4% of its land area. Uttar Pradesh was the most populous state, with about 200 million people.
• The population grew by about 17.7% between 2001 and 2011.
• India's growth since 1901 falls into four phases:
  1. 1901–1921: stagnant or stationary, with high birth and death rates; 1921 is called the "year of the great divide", after which the population never fell again.
  2. 1921–1951: steady growth, as death rates fell with better health and sanitation.
  3. 1951–1981: rapid growth (population explosion), as death rates fell sharply while birth rates stayed high.
  4. Since 1981: high but slowing growth, as birth rates began to decline.
• The demographic transition describes this pattern: a society moves from high birth and death rates, through a stage of falling death rates and rapid growth, to low birth and death rates and slow growth.

Distribution and Density

• Population density is the number of people per unit area. India's average arithmetic density in 2011 was 382 persons per sq km. Bihar was the most densely populated state (over 1,100 persons per sq km) and Arunachal Pradesh the least (17).
• Physiological density is total population divided by net cultivated area; agricultural density is agricultural population divided by net cultivable area. They show the pressure of people on farmland.
• Distribution is uneven. People crowd into fertile river plains (the Ganga plain), coastal lowlands and industrial or urban areas, and are few in high mountains, deserts and dense forests. The main factors are physical (relief, climate, water, soil), economic (minerals, industry, transport, cities) and social and historical (old settlements, religious and cultural centres).

Population Composition

• Sex ratio in India is the number of females per 1,000 males. It was 943 in 2011; Kerala had the highest (1,084) and Haryana one of the lowest (below 880). The ratio is lower still among young children, a sign of continuing bias against girls.
• Age structure: India has a young population, with a large share of children and working-age adults. This can be a demographic dividend if young people get education and jobs.
• Literacy: about three-quarters of people aged seven and above were literate in 2011, with a clear gap between males and females and between states.
• Rural–urban composition: about 68.8% of Indians lived in rural areas and 31.2% in urban areas in 2011.
• Occupational structure: workers are grouped into primary (agriculture, mining), secondary (manufacturing) and tertiary (services) activities. In 2011 more than half of India's workers still depended on agriculture.

Migration

• Migration is the movement of people from one place to another to live. It may be internal (within the country) or international, and may be classed by distance (within a district, between districts, between states) and by direction: rural to rural, rural to urban, urban to urban and urban to rural.
• Push factors drive people out: poverty, unemployment, low farm incomes, natural disasters and lack of services. Pull factors draw them in: jobs, higher wages, education, health care and better amenities.
• In India, marriage is the main reason women migrate, while work and employment is the main reason for men. Rural to rural is the largest stream, dominated by women moving after marriage; rural to urban streams are dominated by men seeking work.
• Consequences: remittances (money sent home) support families and villages; source areas may lose young workers, while cities gain labour but face crowding; the sex ratio becomes unbalanced in both places; and ideas, skills and cultures spread.

Types of Human Settlements

• A settlement is any place where people build homes and live, from a single farmstead to a megacity.
• Rural settlements depend mainly on primary activities such as farming. Their types are:
  • Clustered (nucleated): houses packed closely together, common in the fertile northern plains and the north-east;
  • Semi-clustered (fragmented): a clustered core with outlying groups, as in parts of the Gujarat plain and Rajasthan;
  • Hamleted: a village split into separate hamlets (locally called panna, para, palli, nagla or dhani), common in the middle and lower Ganga plain and in Chhattisgarh;
  • Dispersed (isolated): scattered single houses, in hilly and forested areas such as Meghalaya, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Kerala.
• Patterns reflect the site: linear (along a road, river or coast), rectangular (in plains), circular (around a lake or tank), star-like (where several roads meet), and T-, Y- or cross-shaped (at road junctions).
• Urban settlements: the Census counts as urban all places with a municipality, corporation, cantonment board or notified town area committee (statutory towns), and other places with at least 5,000 people, at least 75% of male main workers in non-farm work, and a density of at least 400 persons per sq km (census towns). India had 7,935 towns in 2011.
• Towns are classed by size, from Class I (100,000 people or more) down to Class VI (fewer than 5,000). Cities of over a million are metropolitan cities (53 in 2011), and those of over 10 million are megacities: Greater Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata.
• Towns are also classed by function: administrative (Chandigarh, Gandhinagar), industrial (Jamshedpur, Bhilai), transport (ports such as Kandla, junctions such as Itarsi), commercial (Kolkata, Satna), mining (Jharia, Digboi), garrison (Ambala, Mhow), educational (Roorkee, Pilani), religious and cultural (Varanasi, Amritsar, Puri) and tourist towns (Shimla, Nainital, Mount Abu).

Urbanization

• Urbanisation is the growth in the share of a country's people living in towns and cities. It is driven by industrialisation, the growth of services, better amenities and migration from villages.
• It brings jobs, higher incomes, better schools and hospitals and the exchange of ideas, but rapid, unplanned growth also causes housing shortages and slums, traffic congestion, air and water pollution, shortages of water and electricity, and problems of waste disposal.
• Responses include planned development, satellite towns, better public transport, slum upgrading and schemes such as the Smart Cities Mission (2015).

Rural-Urban Migration

• The flow of people from villages to towns is a major cause of urban growth. It relieves pressure on farmland and supplies labour to industry and services, but it can leave villages short of young workers and overload city infrastructure, leading to slums and informal jobs.

Settlements and the Environment

• Growing settlements clear forests, take over farmland and wetlands, and produce large amounts of waste, sewage and air pollution. Dense cities can also become urban heat islands, warmer than the countryside around them.
• Sustainable settlements use land and resources carefully: rainwater harvesting, waste segregation and recycling, green spaces, energy-efficient buildings and public transport. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 11 aims to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

Conclusion

Population and settlements are two sides of the same story: the size, spread and movement of people decide where villages, towns and cities grow, and the way settlements grow decides the quality of people's lives and the health of the environment.