Human Settlements

India’s villages and towns: clustered, semi-clustered, hamleted and dispersed villages, the Census definition of a town, urbanisation, and towns by age and function.

Key ideas

• Rural settlements live on land-based work; urban ones on manufacturing and services.
• Clustered villages are compact (fertile plains, or water scarcity as in Rajasthan); semi-clustered ones are fragmenting; hamleted villages split into units with local names like para, palli or dhani; dispersed settlements are isolated huts in hills and forests.
• By age, towns are ancient (Patna, Madurai), medieval fort towns (Jaipur, Agra), modern towns built by Europeans (Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata) and post-independence towns.
• By function, towns can be administrative, industrial, transport, commercial, mining, educational or tourist; most big cities become multi-functional.
• Satellite towns such as Gurugram and Ghaziabad grow around a metropolitan city.
• Cities serve their rural hinterlands with goods and services in return for food and raw materials.

Remember

Watch out

• Calling a place urban when it passes only one or two of the three Census tests.
• Mixing up hamleted (one village in separate units) and dispersed (isolated huts) settlements.
• Saying clustered villages in Rajasthan are due to fertile soil (water scarcity is the reason).

Worked example