Urbanisation
Urbanisation in the world today is an ongoing process that has a profound impact on people’s living conditions and health status. The globalisation of markets, the desire for higher education, increased use of communication, and new information technologies are the driving forces behind this process. The urbanisation process has marked effects on the natural and cultural environment, on housing arrangements and social networks, as well as on work and employment patterns, not only in the cities, but also in the rural areas.
Access to health care, social services, and cultural activities are in many cases better in the cities, but there the access may not be evenly distributed among the population. Problem of urbanization is manifestation of lopsided urbanization, faulty urban planning, urbanization with poor economic base and without having functional categories . Hence India’s urbanization is followed by some basic problems in the field of : 1) housing, 2) slums, 3) transport 4) water supply and sanitation, 5) water pollution and air pollution, 6)inadequate provision for social infrastructure ( school, hospital, etc ).
Class I cities such as Calcutta , Bombay, Delhi, Madras etc have reached saturation level of employment generating capacity (Kundu,1997). Since these cities are suffering from of urban poverty, unemployment, housing shortage, crisis in urban infra-structural services these large cities can not absorb these distressed rural migrants i. e poor landless illiterate and unskilled agricultural labourers. Hence this migration to urban class I cities causes urban crisis more acute. 2 Most of these cities using capital intensive technologies can not generate employment for these distress rural poor.
So there is transfer of rural poverty to urban poverty. Poverty induced migration of illiterate and unskilled labourer occurs in class I cities addressing urban involution and urban decay. 3 Indian urbanization is involuted not evoluted ( Mukherji, 1995). Poverty induced migration occurs due to rural push . Megacities grow in urban population (Nayak,1962) not in urban prosperity, and culture. Hence it is urbanization without urban functional characteristics.
These mega cities are subject to extreme filthy slum and very cruel mega city denying shelter, drinking water, electricity, sanitation ( Kundu,,Bagchi and Kundu, 1999) to the extreme poor and rural migrants. 4 Urbanisation is degenerating social and economic inequalities ( Kundu and Gupta, 1996) which warrants social conflicts, crimes and anti-social activities. Lopsided and uncontrolled urbanization led to environmental degradation and degradation in the quality of urban life—-pollution in sound, air, water, created by disposal of hazardous waste. Illiterate, low- skill or no-skill migrants from rural areas are absorbed in poor low grade urban informal sector at a very low wage rate and urban informal sector becomes in-efficient and unproductive.
