Gender, social change & urbanization in India
Urbanization in India is reshaping established social and economic patterns of behavior--but how?
By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, for the first time in human history, over half of the world was living in urban areas. Nowhere is this transition more apparent than in India, which is expected to see its urban population rise from around 483 million in 2020 to a projected 877 million in 2050 – more than a million per month over the next three decades.
Urbanisation is as much a social process – transforming behaviour, culture, and social institutions over time – as it is an economic and spatial process. Therefore, India’s rapid urbanisation invites several pressing questions:
What does the transformation of settlement patterns mean for social cleavages and hierarchies in the country?
Will some hierarchies be amplified, and others attenuated or transformed?
In particular, how will urbanisation affect the social norms and practices that govern the economic, political, and social agency of women?
Over the last several years, my colleagues and I have surveyed around 15,000 households across four north Indian clusters (Dhanbad, Indore, Patna, Varanasi, and their surrounding environs) to try to locate answers to these questions. Our findings have been published in a new special issue of Urbanisation and access to our seven articles is free and ungated through mid-January.
For those who want to read our deep-dive into this subject, you can find all seven articles here. But for those pressed for time, we partnered with Ideas for India on short summaries of our main findings. The full list (with links) is below:
Introduction to e-symposium: Urbanisation, gender, and social change in north India, by Devesh Kapur, Neelanjan Sircar, and Milan Vaishnav
Women and work: How much does measurement matter?, by Devesh Kapur, Milan Vaishnav, and Dawson Verley
Why is female labour force participation so low in India?, by Deepaboli Chatterjee and Neelanjan Sircar
Do working women enjoy more agency?, by Megan Maxwell and Milan Vaishnav
Women’s mobility in north India, by Vidisha Mehta and Harish Sai
Intra-marital hierarchies and perceptions about working mothers, by Shubhangi Karia and Tanvi Mehta
Role of the media in shaping women’s political preferences, by Sumitra Badrinathan, Deepaboli Chatterjee, Devesh Kapur, and Neelanjan Sircar
In the years to come, the relationship between urbanization and social change is unlikely to be a linear one. The extent to which social inequalities are reduced or reinforced will depend greatly on how state and society respond to mounting challenges, many of them self-imposed. This body of work hopes to contribute to our collective understanding of the interplay between urbanisation, social change, and gender empowerment, occurring in a significant swath of north India.