Why India’s urbanization is hidden: Observations from “rural” Bihar

In the developing world, processes of urbanization sometimes remain hidden in official statistics and urban populations are thought to be substantially misread. This article aims to better understand why that happens in urbanizing rural India. It situates hidden urban growth within a framework of agrarian transformation and distress-driven employment shifts out of agriculture. The analysis is based on mixed methods research: I draw on geospatial approaches that visualize population concentration and shifts in the economic profiles of villages, and on local fieldwork in rural Bihar, northeastern India. I find that hidden urbanization in Bihar mainly occurs around rapidly growing secondary cities that have spilled over into surrounding villages. Livelihoods in these villages are now for the most part based in secondary and tertiary economic sectors, but for a (declining) number of households farming still remains part of their livelihood portfolios. I show how village leaders, mukhiyas, actively hold on to the “rural” status of these villages even when urban growth has been substantial. Rural-to-urban settlement reclassification has consequences for village residents in terms of cost of living, land-ownership, access to rural development funding, and democratic and inclusive participation in local governance. These findings have a theoretical bearing on urbanizing India, and have direct implications for our understanding of allegedly underdeveloped rural states like Bihar.