Assessment of Urbanization in Census-units through Construction of a Generalized Urbanization Index: A Study for Economically Backward Regions of West Bengal During 1991 to 2011

Abstract

The Census Authority of India usually provides data regarding the nature of a few urbane characteristics for all the village units and thereby classifies a place as Census Town, which is considered as the lowest unit of urbanization. From the perspective of urbanization, regions of any state, consisting of blocks can be classified as economically advanced or economically backward on the basis of existence of Census Towns in it as urban places are likely to bring more prosperity in terms of standard of living. However, proper assessment of urbanization in a single measurement scale, of all village units of a particular block is not done so far. An attempt in that direction is made in this article through construction of a Generalized Urbanization Index (GUI) for all the village units of some blocks, selected through systematic-stratified sampling, from three major districts of Paschim Medinipur, Bankura and Purulia, which are known as ‘so called’ backward regions. The proposed GUI for a census-unit is constructed with two components - the town criteria index and the amenities index and the relative weights of both the component-indices and the underlying dimension indices are determined through the application of Iterative Average Correlation Method indicating some movement towards actuality in comparison to prevailing two other methods of weight determination - the Equal Weights Principle and the Principal Component Analysis.