Industrialization and Urbanisation in India

Industrialisation in India: Historical Overview

Industrialisation refers to the process of developing industries in a country or region on a wide scale. In India, it did not emerge organically from an internal accumulation of capital as it did in Britain: it was shaped, distorted, and ultimately accelerated by the colonial encounter, then redirected after independence through state-led planning.

Colonial Phase: Distorted Industrialisation

The British introduced industrial production in India primarily to serve their own extractive interests: cotton mills, jute mills, and railways were built to process raw materials for export rather than to develop an internal market. The destruction of indigenous cottage industries (Dacca muslin, Surat weaving, Bengal silk) through differential tariff policy was a form of forced deindustrialisation that preceded any substantial reindustrialisation. The first significant Indian-owned industries emerged in Bombay (cotton textiles, 1850s) and Bengal (jute, 1860s), driven partly by the Swadeshi movement and partly by the First World War creating demand for Indian industrial output when British imports declined.

AR Desai's analysis: colonialism introduced a capitalistic mode of production without its accompanying social transformations. Railways and roadways created infrastructure, bureaucracy and legal courts created governance, and cash transactions penetrated rural areas: but the surplus was extracted rather than reinvested in Indian industrial development.

Post-Independence: State-Led Industrialisation

After independence, Nehru's vision of rapid industrialisation through state-led planning shaped India's development strategy. Key features:

• Mixed economy: public sector controlling "commanding heights" (steel, energy, railways, heavy machinery) while private sector developed consumer goods
• Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI): producing domestically what was previously imported
• Industrial Policy Resolution (1956): classified industries into Schedule A (state monopoly), Schedule B (state and private), and Schedule C (private sector)
• Large industrial complexes: Bhilai, Bokaro, Rourkela steel plants; BHEL, NTPC, ONGC, HAL as major public sector undertakings
• Industrial townships emerged (Bhilai, Jamshedpur, Bokaro, Durgapur) with planned worker housing, schools, and hospitals

The industrial policy was critiqued for creating a "Licence-Quota-Permit Raj" that insulated established firms from competition and generated rent-seeking, and for concentrating industrial development in selected regions while leaving large parts of the country industrially underdeveloped.

Post-LPG Phase: Liberalisation and the New Economy

The 1991 economic reforms (Liberalisation, Privatisation, Globalisation) fundamentally changed the character of Indian industrialisation. Key transformations:

• Dismantling of the licence raj; delicensing of most industries
• Opening to foreign direct investment (FDI) and multinational corporations
• Shift from heavy industry to services: IT, business process outsourcing, finance, telecommunications
• Rise of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) generating controversy over land acquisition and labour rights
• Growth of informal sector as large formal enterprises outsourced to smaller units and contract workers
• Informalisation of the industrial workforce: increased casual, contract, and part-time employment reducing job security

Working Class in India

In Marxian terminology, the working class consists of "those who sell their labour" in class-based societies: the proletariat. But the working class in India is a complex, contradictory, and constantly changing entity whose composition, size, and character changes over time.

Two counter views exist on the trajectory of the working class: one argues it is expanding (as students, teachers, blue-collar and white-collar workers, salaried employees all comprise the working class in a broad sense); the other argues it is disappearing (as automation displaces blue-collar industrial jobs). Holmstrom offers a middle ground: "People commonly refer to industrial workers and sometimes other kinds of wage earners and self-employed workers as working class."

Phases of Working Class Development

• Worker's phase (1850-1880): Modern industry established; first factory workers emerged in Bombay cotton mills and Bengal jute mills
• Philanthropic phase (1890s-1915): Heavy industries expanded; working class grew; agriculture deteriorated; Shashipada Banerjee in Bengal started welfare activities in 1870s; LM Lokhande active in Bombay; 'Bharat Shramjivi' monthly magazine started in 1874; 'Deenbandhu' published by Lokhande
• Trade union phase (1915-1947): ILU formed in 1919; AITUC in 1920; at independence, four main trade unions: AITUC, INTUC, HMS, UTUC

Pre-independence working class was geographically localised, highly exploited, mostly unskilled without formal education, and at the bottom of the social pyramid. Mobilisation before independence relied on welfare organisations and early trade unions. Post-LPG mobilisation has moved toward recognition of problems in the unorganised sector, social security measures, microfinance initiatives, and right to education.

Nature and Structure of the Working Class Today

On the basis of wages, there are four types of workers in India (Holmstrom, Dev Nathan):

Type	Character	Sector
Type 1	Permanent employees of large factory sector; get family wage (sufficient to maintain worker and family); highest job security	Public sector; petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, engineering
Type 2	Permanent but do not get a family wage; wages insufficient for family	Older industries: cotton and jute textiles, sugar, paper; tea plantations
Type 3	Contract and casual labourers; bottom of the wage scale; considerable extra-economic coercion and personal bondage; lack of civil rights	Industry, construction, brick-making, casual work
Type 4	Reserve army of labour: petty commodity production, petty trading, hawking, rag-picking; informal sector workers at bare subsistence	Informal economy

Not only is there wage differential among the working class, there is also variation in working conditions. Better-paid labour has greater job security. Workers at the lower end of the wage scale face not only insecurity but also considerable extra-economic coercion and personal bondage: a form of modern unfreedom coexisting with formal legal equality. The situation worsens further for women workers: they are prohibited from working in steel plants on safety grounds but are not prohibited from being employed on the same site as contract labour.

Social Background of the Indian Working Class

The Indian working class came from diverse social backgrounds in which primordial identities (caste, ethnicity, religion, and language) played very important roles. The Ahmedabad study (1973) found that where jobs were secured through introduction by other workers, the introducer was a blood relation in 35% of cases, belonged to the same caste in 44% of cases, and belonged to the same native place in 12% of cases. Friends helped in only 7% of cases. Kinship ties not only play a significant role in securing employment but also in placement on the wage scale.

Five studies of Pune, Kota, Bombay, Ahmedabad, and Bangalore covering large numbers of industries found that 61% of workers were upper-caste Hindus (Sharma, 1970). In higher income jobs, upper castes dominate; Dalits and Adivasis have preponderance in low-wage jobs. The middle castes are concentrated in middle to bottom ranges. Even in the public sector, the representation of backward castes, SCs, and STs is not proportional to their population. Caste-based division of labour is followed in Class III and IV government and public sector jobs: sweeper jobs are reserved for Dalits; hard physical labour in coal mines and coke ovens is mainly done by Dalits and Adivasis.

Deshpande (1979) shows this results from "pre-labour market characteristics" such as education and land holdings: those with more land and education ended up in higher wage sectors, while depressed conditions of Adivasis and Dalits ensured supply of labour who can be made to work at mere subsistence level (Nathan, 1987). Caste thus ensures cheap labour for different jobs by not paying more than necessary: keeping lower sections in lower strata of the working class while giving upper castes privilege in the labour market. Caste is not only a matter of marriage and residence but more so a continuing pool of social relations for the supply of various kinds of labour for the capitalist mode of production.

Formal and Informal Sectors

The term "informal sector" was coined by the anthropologist Keith Hart from fieldwork among migrants in Accra, presented in 1971 and published as "Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana" (1973). The ILO's Kenya mission report (1972) brought it into development policy. Hart showed that urban migrants who looked unemployed were in fact earning through petty trade, small services and casual work outside the reach of state regulation.

Formal (organised) sector	Informal (unorganised) sector
Registered enterprises, the public sector and factories covered by labour laws	Unregistered, small, household-based or own-account enterprises
Written contracts, regular wages, job security	Casual, piece-rate or contract work without a written contract
Social security: provident fund, ESI, gratuity, paid leave	Little or no social security
Union rights and collective bargaining	Weak or absent unions
More capital and technology, inside the tax net	Low capital, easy entry, largely outside the tax net

Indian definitions. The National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS), set up in 2004 under Arjun Sengupta, defined the unorganised sector as unincorporated private enterprises owned by individuals or households, run on a proprietary or partnership basis, with fewer than ten workers. Unorganised workers include those working in such enterprises and households, and also workers in the formal sector without employment or social security benefits. International labour statisticians make the same distinction between the informal sector, defined by the enterprise (1993), and informal employment, defined by the job (2003). The NCEUS estimated that over 90 per cent of India's workforce was informal, and its 2007 report found 77 per cent of Indians living on less than Rs 20 a day.

Why the informal sector has grown in India

• Jobless growth: the formal sector has never absorbed more than a small share of the workforce, so people leaving agriculture enter construction, trade and services informally.
• Informalisation from above: after 1991, formal firms cut costs by subcontracting to small units and hiring contract and casual labour, so informal workers now sit inside formal enterprises (Jan Breman).
• Rural push: agrarian distress drives seasonal and circular migrants into urban informal work.
• Compliance costs: the legalist view holds that firms stay small and unregistered to escape regulation and tax.

The urban informal labour market is segmented by caste, gender and region. Street vendors, domestic workers, head-loaders, waste pickers and home-based workers face insecure incomes, no social security, poor housing and harassment by police and municipal officials. The Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), founded by Ela Bhatt in Ahmedabad in 1972, showed that informal women workers can organise, and the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act 2014 recognised vendors' right to a livelihood.

Formalisation of the Informal Sector

Formalisation means bringing informal enterprises and workers within the reach of registration, law and social protection. In India it has followed several routes:

• Unorganised Workers' Social Security Act 2008: passed after the NCEUS reports, it provided for social security schemes and a National Social Security Board for unorganised workers.
• Labour codes: the Code on Wages 2019 and the Code on Social Security 2020, which subsumed the 2008 Act, came into force with the other labour codes on 21 November 2025. The social security code recognises gig and platform workers for the first time and provides for schemes for them.
• e-Shram (2021): an Aadhaar-linked national database of unorganised workers, meant to make welfare portable.
• Pensions and credit: Atal Pension Yojana (2015), Pradhan Mantri Shram Yogi Maan-dhan (2019) and PM SVANidhi loans for street vendors (2020).
• State laws: Rajasthan's Platform Based Gig Workers (Registration and Welfare) Act 2023 was the first state law for gig workers.
• Fiscal formalisation: GST (2017), digital payments and Udyam registration of small enterprises draw firms into the formal economy.

Assessment. Registration is not protection. Benefits remain small, contributory schemes have low take-up, and domestic workers still lack a central law. The shocks of demonetisation (2016) and the early GST hit cash-based informal units hardest, bringing job losses and underemployment, with women in home-based and piece-rate work among the most exposed. Meanwhile contract labour keeps growing inside formal firms. Dalits, Adivasis, women and migrants gain from formalisation only when it brings enforceable rights and not merely an identity number.

Child Labour

Child labour is work that deprives children of their childhood, schooling and health. Census 2011 counted about 10.1 million working children aged 5 to 14, mostly in agriculture, household industries, brick kilns, carpets (Mirzapur-Bhadohi), glass bangles (Firozabad), fireworks (Sivakasi) and domestic work.

Myron Weiner (The Child and the State in India, 1991) rejected the view that poverty alone explains child labour. Comparing India with Europe, the United States, Japan and other Asian countries, he showed that child labour ended where the state made primary education compulsory and enforced it, often before those countries became rich. India failed to do so because of the beliefs of its officials, teachers and middle class: a view of society as a hierarchy in which poor children should learn their parents' work, a fear that educating them would create misfits and unemployment, and the claim that poor families need their children's earnings.

Causes

• Poverty and debt: families pledge children's labour against loans, a form of bonded labour
• Demand: informal employers want cheap, docile workers who cannot unionise, and the "nimble fingers" argument is used to justify children's work in carpets and embroidery
• Schooling: poor quality, distance, teacher absence and caste discrimination push children out of school
• Caste and gender: Dalit and Adivasi children are over-represented, and girls' unpaid domestic and sibling-care work goes uncounted
• Migration: children of seasonal migrants follow their parents to brick kilns and sugarcane fields and drop out

Law and policy. Article 24 bars children under 14 from factories, mines and hazardous work, and Article 21A (2002) with the Right to Education Act 2009 guarantees free schooling from 6 to 14. The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act 1986, amended in 2016 as the Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, bans all employment of children under 14 and the employment of adolescents aged 14 to 18 in hazardous occupations. In M.C. Mehta v. State of Tamil Nadu (1996) the Supreme Court ordered offending employers to pay Rs 20,000 per child into a welfare fund. India ratified ILO Conventions 138 and 182 in 2017.

Has law abolished child labour? Not yet. The 2016 amendment lets children help in family enterprises after school hours, which covers most child work on farms, in homes and in workshops and is hard to monitor. Enforcement is weak, convictions are few and rehabilitation is thin. Child labour therefore raises questions beyond the informal sector, about education, caste, gender, agrarian distress and the definition of work itself. Neera Burra (Born to Work, 1995) and the M.V. Foundation of Hyderabad argued that every child out of school is a child labourer, so universal schooling of good quality is the surest remedy. Practical measures include tracking every out-of-school child, seasonal hostels for migrant children, income support for parents through MGNREGA and social security, supply-chain audits in export trades, and joint action by the labour, education and police departments.

Types of Cities in India

Indian cities can be classified by the dominant economic function they serve:

• Industrial towns: Mumbai (textiles, finance, port), Bhilai, Bokaro (steel)
• Commercial towns: Kolkata, Surat, Ahmedabad
• Mining towns: Raniganj, Jharia (coal)
• Garrison/Cantonment towns: Ambala, Jalandhar, Pune (Cantonment)
• Education towns: Roorkee, Aligarh, Pune (university city)
• Tourist towns: Nainital, Mussoorie, Shimla

Urbanisation in India

Urbanisation refers to the process of increasing concentration of population in urban areas and the accompanying transformation of economic, social, and cultural life. Almost all contemporary social problems have been associated with the process of urbanisation: crime, mental illness, broken family life, poor housing, poverty, unemployment, class conflict, racial and ethnic conflict, drug addiction, and pollution are often grouped under "the urban crisis." But to describe cities only in terms of their problems is akin to describing human beings in terms of their diseases.

Indian cities have played an important role in breaking away from tradition-bound social practices. It is from cities that most of the modernisation processes radiate outward. Political and social reform movements have largely originated in cities and then spread.

Louis Wirth's Urbanism as a Way of Life

Louis Wirth defined the city as "a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of heterogeneous individuals." For Wirth, the city is not merely a point where great numbers are concentrated into limited space: it is also a complex heterogeneity in almost every characteristic in which human beings can differ. Wirth identified three key variables producing the urban way of life: size (large population increases the range of individual variation but weakens bonds of kinship and neighbourhood); density (intensifies differentiation, specialisation, and competition); and heterogeneity (blends diverse racial and ethnic groups into new cultural aggregates, producing a world of strangers). The city, by virtue of its focal position in capitalist civilisation, "has attracted within its confines the racial and ethnic stocks of all the world and has more or less amalgamated them and blended their traits into a new aggregate of hybrids."

Theories of Urbanisation

Modernisation Theory (Parsons, Lerner): Urbanisation is a correlate of modernisation. The shift from traditional to modern society involves urbanisation alongside industrialisation, commercialisation, and democratisation. Cities are centres of diffusion from which modernity radiates outward into rural areas.

Dependency Theory (Castells, Harvey): Urbanisation in developing countries is driven by the needs of global capital rather than internal development. Cities in the periphery (Mumbai, Delhi, São Paulo, Lagos) are centres of capital accumulation and labour exploitation rather than wellbeing. Urban poverty and slums are products of uneven development produced by capitalism, not failures of modernisation.

MSA Rao (Indian perspective), Urbanisation in India should be understood in relation to its specific social structure, caste, kinship, and village identities continue to shape urban social life. The concept of "mohalla culture" captures how city dwellers from the same regional or caste background cluster together, maintaining primary group solidarity in an otherwise impersonal urban environment. Remittances from urban migrants maintain functional jointness of families back in villages.

Impact of Urbanisation on the Environment

Dimension	Impact
Physical Environment	Air quality deterioration; water quality decline; solid waste generation; noise pollution
Social Environment	Growth of slums; increase in crime; anomie and social isolation; breakdown of community ties
Environmental Infrastructure	Housing and amenities deficit; energy infrastructure strain; transport congestion

Overurbanisation and Recent Urban Trends

Kingsley Davis and Hilda Hertz Golden (1954) used the term overurbanisation for urban growth that runs ahead of industrial employment. In the West, factories pulled workers into towns. In much of Asia and Africa, rural poverty pushes people into cities that cannot give them jobs, housing or services. Bert Hoselitz (1955) similarly distinguished "generative" cities, which stimulate growth in their region, from "parasitic" ones, which draw resources from it without return.

Trends in India (Census 2011)

• Level and pace: 377 million people, 31.1 per cent of the population, lived in urban areas, up from 27.8 per cent in 2001. For the first time since independence, urban areas added more people in a decade than rural areas.
• Census towns: settlements with at least 5,000 people, a density of 400 per sq km and three-quarters of male main workers outside agriculture rose from 1,362 to 3,894. Much new urbanisation is villages becoming urban in place while still governed as villages, what K.C. Pradhan called "unacknowledged urbanisation".
• Metropolitan concentration: million-plus cities rose from 35 to 53, and growth spills into the peri-urban fringes of Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad.
• Small towns: Denis, Mukhopadhyay and Zérah call the growth of small towns that is not driven by the metropolises "subaltern urbanisation".
• Slums: 65.5 million people lived in slums in 2011.

Rural push and overurbanisation. India is under-urbanised by world standards, yet its urban growth outpaces formal industrial jobs. Migrants pushed out by tiny holdings, agrarian distress, drought and caste oppression in Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh and Odisha end up in construction, vending and other informal work. Demographically, natural increase among urban residents now adds more to urban growth than migration, and the reclassification of villages as towns is a large third component. Sociologically, the result is a city of informal workers, slums and circular migrants who keep one foot in the village, clustered by caste and region in M.S.A. Rao's mohalla culture, rather than Wirth's anonymous urbanite.

Is industrialisation the only precondition of urbanisation? No. Industry built Jamshedpur, Bhilai and Bokaro, but Indian towns have also grown as administrative capitals (Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar, Gandhinagar), pilgrimage centres (Varanasi, Puri, Tirupati), coaching and education hubs (Kota), cantonments, trading and transport nodes, and service and IT centres (Bengaluru, Gurugram) where growth came from services rather than factories. Reclassification of large villages and rural distress also produce urban growth without industrialisation.

Consequences and concerns: overcrowding, water shortage and urban flooding (Mumbai 2005, Chennai 2015), pollution and heat, informal housing, the exclusion of migrants from welfare, and weak urban local bodies despite the 74th Amendment. The Smart Cities Mission and AMRUT (2015) concentrate on infrastructure, while critics call for planning that includes the informal poor.

The Rural-Urban Continuum

Early sociology treated rural and urban as opposite types: Tönnies's Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Durkheim's mechanical and organic solidarity, Wirth's urbanism as a way of life. Robert Redfield replaced the dichotomy with a continuum. In The Folk Culture of Yucatan (1941) he compared four Mexican communities, from the tribal village of Tusik and the peasant village of Chan Kom to the town of Dzitas and the city of Merida. Moving towards the city, he found increasing cultural disorganisation, secularisation and individualism. Settlements differ by degree rather than kind and lie along a folk-urban continuum.

The continuum in India

• Census towns and peri-urban villages: settlements around Delhi, Gurugram and Bengaluru mix farming with factory, transport and service work while remaining villages in administration.
• Commuting and circular migration: daily commuters and seasonal migrants live in both worlds, carrying money, goods and ideas between them.
• M.S.A. Rao (Urbanisation and Social Change, 1970): in Yadavpur, a village on the fringe of Delhi, villagers were drawn into urban jobs, land markets and politics while keeping their caste and kinship ties.
• Two-way exchange: caste, kin and village networks survive in urban mohallas, while villages adopt urban consumption, media, schooling and politics.
• Policy: the idea of "rurban" clusters underlies the Shyama Prasad Mukherji Rurban Mission (2016), which provides urban amenities to groups of villages.

Critique. Oscar Lewis's restudy of Tepoztlán (1951), a village Redfield had earlier described as harmonious, found conflict and individualism, so the folk end of the continuum was idealised. The model also assumes that change flows one way, from city to village, and treats rural and urban as cultural types while ignoring the class and power relations that bind them.

Slums and Deprivation in Urban Areas

Definitions

A slum is defined by the Government of India as any area that is dilapidated, overcrowded, with faulty arrangement of buildings, and lacking in ventilation, light, or sanitation facilities: or any combination of these factors detrimental to safety, health, and morals. The new definition (Pranab Sen Committee) includes even small clusters of 20-25 households in contiguous areas exhibiting slum-like characteristics such as little or no access to basic civic amenities. Earlier the threshold was 60 households. India's urban slum population was estimated at 75.2 million in 2001 and was expected to cross 100 million by 2017.

Sociologically, slums are sub-standard, haphazard housing systems with low sanitation, high crime rates, apathy, social isolation, and anonymity. Wirth argued slums are a way of life which is predominantly unhygienic. Oscar Lewis identified a "culture of poverty": a set of values, attitudes, and behaviours transmitted across generations that prevents people from striving to change their lives and perpetuates poor conditions. Trilok Singh noted that slums put pressure on urban infrastructure and generate an inherent sense of both relative and absolute deprivation when compared to prosperous neighbours.

Causes of Slum Formation

• Original slums formed through land squatting by rural migrants seeking urban employment
• Slums created when the erstwhile middle class moved away, leaving older housing to deteriorate
• Slums created around sources of employment that offer low remuneration: proximity to work overrides quality of housing
• Unplanned growth: many Indian cities have grown without planning, with land use patterns developing organically around economic activities without adequate housing infrastructure
• MSA Rao: mohalla culture, migrants cluster with kin and caste fellows, producing dense slum settlements with high social solidarity but poor physical conditions
• Demographic dynamism: expansionist modernity and declining agriculture push rural surplus population into cities without commensurate housing supply

Functions of Slums

Despite their physical degradation, slums perform important social functions:

• Labour supply: slums house the labour force essential for industrial, construction, and service sectors
• Small industries: home-based and cottage industries producing for both local and export markets (Dharavi, Mumbai is a famous example)
• Housing for low-income migrants: the only affordable shelter option for new urban arrivals
• School for newcomers of urban life: slum communities orient migrants to urban norms, skills, and opportunities
• Place for anonymity: escape from village social controls enables social experimentation and individual freedom

Deprivation in Slums

• Economic: inadequate housing, power cuts, costly transport, unsafe water, absence of drainage
• Environmental: pollution, garbage accumulation, lack of green space, flood vulnerability
• Social: social exclusion, poverty trap, poor education access, high disease burden, alcoholism, domestic violence, communal riots

Approaches to Slum Eradication

Approach	Core Argument	Critique
Marxist	Slum is a conscious creation of the political and economic dominant class; need to give entire population similar homes	Does not address immediate practical needs; oversimplifies market mechanisms
Welfarist	Tear down slums, remake them (Rajiv Awas Yojana)	Gita Dewan Verma: remade houses are sub-let by residents and pave way for corruption; Wirth: need is to change culture, not just houses
Community Development	Identify local leaders, change way of life and occupation; enable self-help	Kalpana Sharma found in Dharavi that CDA is successful in the long term; most effective but slow
Humanitarian	Give people assurance of tenure; they'll develop good practices themselves	Assumes causality runs from security to improvement; may not work without complementary support
Modernisation	Slums are temporary; with modernity, slum dwellers will become landowners	Ignores structural causes; empirically refuted by persistence of slums in highly developed cities
Supreme Court directive	Approach shall be slum-dweller oriented, not slum oriented	Rights-based framework; emphasises dignity over demolition

Government Schemes for Urban Poverty and Housing

• Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY): "Housing for All" by 2022; affordable housing through credit-linked subsidy scheme
• Smart Cities Mission: 100 cities selected for infrastructure upgrade, digital governance, and economic growth
• JNNURM (Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission): reform-linked urban infrastructure investment
• PURA (Providing Urban Amenities to Rural Areas): rural reconstruction to reduce pressure on urban migration
• Decentralisation of Urban governance: 74th Constitutional Amendment; Urban Local Bodies empowered to address local urban problems

Urban Poverty

Urban poverty makes poverty more visible: particularly in industrial towns and cities where large numbers of labouring poor are found in and out of ill-paid and insecure employment. Poverty and overcrowding are the two most visible features of the industrial slum. Segregation and exclusion were governed by caste in India just as they were governed by race elsewhere, but poverty plays a large role. Social disability and economic disadvantage go hand in hand.

Andre Beteille: income and expenditure are important, but other factors, security of livelihood, disconnection from family and community, overcrowding, sanitation and health, are equally significant. Individuals and families may suffer from a chronic sense of loss and deprivation even where there is an increase in average earnings: this is social and cultural dislocation, not merely economic deprivation. Poverty studies remain incomplete unless they account for this sense of loss. The new settlements that emerge in rapidly urbanising areas often have a makeshift character, with laxity in rules governing conduct: and women and children become victims of new forms of social abuse.

Regionalism in India

Regionalism refers to situating approach and sentiment toward a particular region: an ideology and political movement seeking to advance the causes of regions. It is found to have connections with cultural patterns that exist as part of the dominant culture. It plays a role both within the nation (internal self-determination) and at the international level. It can be a form of resistance against the imposition of a particular cultural ideology threatening national integration, or it can be a force for unity: bringing regional grievances to national attention and reinforcing unity in diversity.

Regionalism in India: Historical Background

Upon the recommendation of the States Reorganisation Committee (1953, headed by Fazal Ali), provinces were recognised on the basis of language. By the 1960s, provinces settled within redrawn linguistic boundaries: Bombay divided into Maharashtra (Marathi) and Gujarat (Gujarati); Punjab trifurcated into Punjab (Punjabi), Haryana (Hindi), and Himachal Pradesh (Pahari); Kannada-speaking areas formed Karnataka; Telugu-speaking areas formed Andhra Pradesh. Then demands for autonomy emerged in the Northeast: Manipur, Tripura and Meghalaya became states in 1972; NEFA granted statehood as Arunachal Pradesh in 1987. The restive Nagas and Mizos were granted statehood only after violent encounters: Nagaland in 1963 (insurgency continues); Mizoram after 1986 Laldenga accord.

Factors Causing Regionalism

• Relative deprivation: if people of a particular region feel more deprived than others in distribution of resources and infrastructure, regional affiliation emerges (e.g. GNLF movement in Darjeeling: perceived as most underdeveloped compared to southern West Bengal; growing regional inequalities post-LPG with coastal regions benefiting more from private investment)
• Language and culture: identity based on language, once politicised, plays important role in region formation; Edward Sapir: language plays vital role in creation and determination of a region; anti-Hindi imposition movements in South India
• Unequal access to political power: local elites complain of "reverse" discrimination as elites from other regions corner financial grants and lucrative portfolios
• Reaction against cultural imposition: Assam anti-foreigner movement to preserve Assamese culture; South resisting Hindi imposition as northern dominance
• Administrative neglect: continuous neglect by ruling parties; "sons of soil" theory promoted to advance interests of neglected groups; demand for decentralisation; demand to bifurcate unilingual states
• Elite power ambitions: regional parties (DMK, AIADMK, Akali Dal, Telugu Desam, AGP) have encouraged regionalism to capture power
• Modernisation and mass participation interaction: various groups failing to identify group interests with national interests
• Aspirations of backward areas: local political leaders fed the idea that central government deliberately maintains regional imbalances

Son of the Soil Theory

The "son of the soil" theory emerges from competition for jobs between migrant and local educated middle-class youth. This theory works mostly in cities, because outsiders also get opportunities for education and employment there. Major involvement of people is due to rising aspirations combined with the economy's failure to create enough employment opportunities. It is essentially a nativist claim that locals have priority rights over employment and resources in their region: politically powerful but sociologically problematic in a country where the Constitution guarantees freedom of movement and the right to work anywhere.

Outcomes of Regionalist Movements

• Regional identity, culture, and geographical differences now appear to be better recognised as a valid basis for administrative division and political representation
• Separate statehood movements are no longer stigmatised as parochial and antinational as in the past
• New states are now proposed on grounds of good governance and development rather than language alone (Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh: formed 2000)
• Dialect communities have asked for their own territorial homelands (Bundelkhand, Ruhelkhand, Mithilanchal)

SR Maheshwari (quoting Rasheeduddin Khan) suggests the criterion for recognising a region should be "maximum homogeneity within and maximum identity without": established across ten counts including language/dialect, social composition, ethnic features, demographic features, geographic contiguity, cultural patterns, economic life, historical antecedents, political background, and psychological group identity.

Ashok Behuria argues the Indian federation has temperamentally behaved as a "union" and not a "federation." Leadership must adopt federal principles and gradually devolve powers, especially financial powers, to units if it is to contain ethnocultural assertions. Regionalism is a dynamic, pragmatic concept that seldom sustains itself on one single factor. The problem begins when regional interests are politicised for ulterior political motives: such unhealthy sub-regional patriotism can be cancerous and disruptive, as seen in separatist demands in J&K and by ULFA in Assam.

A Kumar argues that the underlying principle in various accommodations of identity in India has remained internal self-determination: which has served to weaken the bases of political secessionism while not defeating the principle of self-determination itself. Creation of "dependent" states alone will not improve conditions; a genuinely developed, re-federalised system of governance is needed.