Urbanization is a major challenge facing most developing countries today.
This is especially true in India, where the urban population share is only about 33 percent, much lower than for other emerging market countries, for instance China (48 percent), Mexico (78 percent), South Korea (83 percent) and Brazil (87 percent).
Even so, when India’s economic growth accelerated to close to 8 percent per annum in the 2001-2011 decade, compared with 5.5 percent in the previous two decades, it led to a faster pace of urbanization and deficiencies in urban infrastructure and service delivery became very obvious.