Urban India : historical processes and contemporary experience : April 29 - May 1, 2011, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT / organized by the South Asian Studies Council and sponsored by the Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy (JCCD).

Scholars, and governments, across Asia have begun to recognize the massive urbanization underway all over the region. At a recent symposium (Ann Arbor, October 2009) on urbanization in China organizers noted that in two decades more Chinese people would be found living in cities than in the countryside. Both China, and India, the two most populous countries in the world, have recognized urbanization as crucial to their economic development and have planned for unprecedented urban expansion. India expects to have 26 cities with population over 1 million by 2030, easily surpassing the ten US cities of that size. This projected spurt in urbanization and growth of cities, especially large metropolitan centers in India, comes in the wake of high rates of GDP growth in India, since the early1990s, and especially in the last decade. So, while urban population, as a proportion of total population, in India increased gradually, but significantly, from 10.87 percent in 1901 to 27.78 percent in 2001, it has since topped 30 percent of the total population in the last ten years, and is expected to grow faster in coming decades.--Book Cover.