As India urbanizes, rural places reclassified as urban should not deprive anyone of welfare benefits
The United Nations’ World Urbanization Prospects 2025 report reframes this problem in a way that is harder to set aside. Where the Indian system asks a binary question, the UN’s ‘Degree of Urbanization’ methodology treats settlements as a continuum, classifying every square kilometre of a country as city, town or semi-dense area, or rural, using consistent and internationally comparable thresholds of population, density and contiguity.
