Delhi/Mumbai: The urban agglomeration of Delhi has for the first time overtaken that of Mumbai, whose UA’s population in 2011 stood at 18.4 million according to the latest census data, but if Vasai-Virar municipal corporation is added to Mumbai UA, it still stands shy of 20 million.
If the same satellites are added to 2001 data, Delhi UA was still smaller than Mumbai a decade ago — 15.5 million to Mumbai’s 16.6 million — showing that the relative change has taken place in the past 10 years. Overall, Delhi-NCR’s population has shot up 40% to 21.7 million in the last decade.
Kolkata was listed by the census in 2001 to be the second biggest Indian UA with 13.2 million people it remains the third biggest UA with 14.1 million people now.
The big three — known as “megacities” since they have populations of more than 10 million — remain far ahead of the other big cities. About 15% of India’s total urban population lives in these three cities. Along with the rest of the country, population growth is slowing down in these cities too, more so for Kolkata and Mumbai. Delhi is also slowing down, but it still added more than five million people — a third of its 2001 size — in 10 years.
Chennai, which remains the fourth biggest, is less than half the size of Mumbai or Delhi. Bangalore has knocked Hyderabad off the fifth position and is now almost as large as Chennai 8.5 million to Chennai’s 8.7 million, closing a gap of almost a million that existed in the last census. S Parasuraman, director of the Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Social Sciences, attributed this to the “economic activities in these centres. They have improved significantly.”
Comparing the cost of living in Mumbai and Bangalore, he said: “The cost of a house in the heart of Bangalore is the same as the cost of a similar-sized house in Dombivli, in the outskirts of Mumbai.” Overall, there are now 53 million-plus cities as compared to 35 in 2001 and 43% of India’s urban population lives in them. Among the new cities on this list is Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir’s first million-plus city. Rapidly urbanizing Kerala has added six new million-plus cities to Kochi, its only such city in 2001, and Jharkhand now has three where it had none. Orissa, on the other hand, does not have a single million-plus city nor does the entire north-east. More than a quarter of a billion people live in just 468 Indian cities known as Class I cities, each having a population greater than one lakh.
Times of India | Page: 9 Rukmini Shrinivasan &Hemali Chhapia TNN, New Delhi | October 20, 2011
