The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs told a Parliamentary panel that the four-decade-old Census Town criteria fail to capture India's actual pace and pattern of urbanisation.

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• The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs told the Parliamentary Standing Committee that the Registrar General of India's Census Town criteria, unchanged since 1981, cannot capture India's real urban transformation.
• A settlement qualifies as a Census Town only if it has a population of at least 5,000, is at least 400 persons per square kilometre dense, and has 75% of male workers in non-agricultural jobs.
• A Census Town is a statistical category, not a legal one: it is counted as urban by the Census while remaining governed as a village under Panchayati Raj institutions.
• The Ministry had already flagged these objections to the Registrar General in a communication sent in February 2024, ahead of Census 2027.
• The Registrar General has decided to retain the existing 1981 definition for Census 2027, citing logistical constraints on finalising enumeration blocks in time.
• The Ministry criticised the "male bias" in the criteria, since only male non-agricultural workers are counted, overlooking women's growing role in rural services and manufacturing.
• Uniform population and density thresholds were said to disadvantage dispersed Himalayan and North-Eastern settlements that perform urban functions despite smaller populations.
• Using large revenue-village boundaries to calculate density understates it, so compact, built-up peri-urban settlements can remain wrongly classified as rural.
• The Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister has estimated India's actual urbanisation level could have been as high as 63% in 2015, against 31.2% recorded in Census 2011.
• Settlements left under Panchayat governance often lack the municipal staff, planning powers and building regulations needed to manage rapid urban growth.
• The Ministry proposed using satellite imagery and creating a new "transitional areas" category to better capture rapidly urbanising peri-urban belts and industrial corridors.
• Rapidly urbanising settlements without municipal status often lack access to urban infrastructure funding, encouraging unplanned peri-urban sprawl and weak service delivery.

Tags: CensusTown, UrbanisationIndia, RegistrarGeneralOfIndia