One consequence of the urbanization defined by the spurt in census towns has been changes in buying preferences

In a recent study, analytics company Nielsen charted the rise of the small-town consumer in India: “In a land of over 8,000 towns and 600,000 villages, where is demand the strongest?” the report asked. It found that value growth for packaged consumer goods was led by the smallest of small town consumers. “While middle India (100,000-1 million towns) leads the pack in same-store sales for the last three-year period, smaller towns with a population of 1 lakh and below have surged far ahead of the rest in 2011,” the report said. (…).

As a result, Bihar’s urbanization goes largely uncaptured by the census data, said Eric Denis, head of the social sciences department at the French Institute of Pondicherry, who worked on the e-Geopolis project (of which the Indian constituent, Indiapolis, attempts to map all settlements of over 10,000 people in the country using satellite imagery and census data). On Denis’s map, Bihar looks densely agglomerated, but, as the report notes, only 15% of the settlements shown on the map are officially designated as towns.

Cordelia Jenkins, Anupama Chandrashekharan and Anuja for live mint – 04 Oct. 2012

Full article here

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