CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS

CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS

Rural - Urban Areas
The Census data on houses, household amenities and assets are presented separately for rural and urban areas. The unit of classification in this regard is 'town' for urban areas and 'village' for rural areas. According to the definition of town by the Census of India 2001, urban area includes:
(a) all places with a municipality, corporation, cantonment
board or notified town area committee, etc.
(b) a place satisfying the following three criteria simul­
taneously:
(i) a minimum population of 5,000;
(ii) at least 75 per cent of male working population
engaged in non-agricultural pursuits; and
(iii) a density of population of at least 400 per sq km
(1,000 per sq. mile).
Apart from these, the outgrowths (OGs) of cities and towns have also been treated as urban under 'Urban Agglom­erations': Examples of OGs are railway colonies, university campuses, port areas, military camps, etc. that may have come up near a statutory town or city but within the revenue limits of a village or villages contiguous to the town or city. Each such individual area by itself may not satisfy the demographic criteria laid down at (b) above to qualify it to be treated as an independent urban unit but may deserve to be clubbed with the towns as a continuous urban spread. Thus, the town level data, wherever presented, also includes the data for OGs of such towns.

City
Towns with population of 1,00,000 and above are called cities.