A Study On Urbanization In North Eastern States Of India

Background: In the process of development of any nation or state, urbanization is an important aspect. The concept of urbanization is the transformation process of the rural agricultural population who moved to lived cities and towns and became an urban non-agricultural population. North East (NE) States of India comprises of seven states namely Assam, Arunachal PradeshNagaland and Tripura., Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Objective :To study the levels and trends of urbanization in North Eastern Region of India and to understand the state wise comparison of percentage of urban population and growth rate . Methodology: The present study is based on secondary data collected from various census publications of Directorate of Census Operations Registrar General serial, India New Delhi. The data were collected for the period 1951-2011 taking into account the various census years. Findings: In 1951 the urban population of NE region was 4,59,874 (4.48 percent of total population) which increased to 82,16,089 (18.26 percent of total population) in 2011.During the early period i.e 1951-1961 the decadal growth rate of urban population of NE region was increased by 139.83 percent and after that the decadal growth rate of urban population declined abruptly to 67.44 percent in 1961-71 and finally it touched at 37.58 percent in 2011 census year. In regard to both decadal growth rate and average annual exponential growth rate of urban population NE region for all the decades were as high as compared to all India figures. The percentage of urban population to the population in NE region is increasing over the census years, but still low than the national’s figures. Conclusion: It can be concluded that the overall process of urbanization in agro -based North East is very slow basically due to its location and infrastructural problems. Development of secondary sectors also not up to the mark in this region resulted in heavy dependence on agriculture sector.