 Let me ask Amitabh Kundu to be the next speaker. Professor Amitabh Kundu is at the Jawaharlal Naira University in Delhi. He's among our most leading scholars on urban issues, which you will see for yourself. He's also now a member of the National Statistical Commission. Amitabh? Dr. Abba Davis, Dr. Rakesh Mohan, colleagues and friends, is honour and privilege for me to associate with this Urban Age Conference, specifically sharing the session with Dr. Riki Brudet and Professor Saskia Sasen. Let me straight away take you from the dualistic urban morphology of Sao Paulo and Shanghai and Manhattan to the Indian city system. The dualism of Indian economic and social structure is manifest nowhere as distinctly and as emphatically as in the trends, patterns and projections of urbanisation. On the one hand, there are apprehensions that there will be urban explosion exodus from the rural areas to the urban areas in the next four to five decades for good or bad reasons associated with globalization, crossing the magic limit of 50% of urban population by 2050 or even earlier. On the other hand, there are serious concerns that large number of small and medium towns are not experiencing the economic and the demographic growth, particularly in the backward regions. Now as far as the projection exercises are concerned, I must say that most of them have been carried out within the framework of an alarmistic framework of over urbanisation and this is one thesis of over urbanisation on which there seems to be a convergence of views between the proponents of globalization and the critics of globalization. They all tend to talk about a massive urban growth although the data from the population census does indicate a significant deceleration from 3.8% annual exponential growth rate in the 70s to 3.1% per annum in the 80s to currently 2.7% in the 90s. Now it's indeed true that UN projections, particularly UN population division, are closer to reality and every second year they have revised the projected urban population downwards the moment they had access to the sampling registration system or the census data but still it's on the higher side. Basically because of the methodology of projection, urban rural growth differential for India is taken to be increasing to some hypothetical urban rural growth differential which is set too high and I think most of the projections for the larger cities by the UN population division is on the higher side. I don't think I have time here to speculate on the factors which are responsible for this alarmistic viewpoint on urbanisation. Is it the vested interest of the elite class who want larger location for the better off and so-called middle class localities? Is it the justification of the massive demolitions and evictions that have taken place in many of the metropolitan cities or is it because of a rationale, building a rationale for the negative perspective on migration that Dr. Rakesh Mohan quoted from UNFPA document which has also pointed this out. But nonetheless, all the calculations that we did at our centre by taking alternate scenarios does still and I'm answering this question whether the urban growth rate is likely to go up. Indeed, urban growth rate population, urban population would certainly decline. That's basically because of population growth rate going down. But urban rural growth differential is likely to go up a bit and our projection tells us that the projected urban population by 2050 would be somewhere between 40% or 42%. Basically because of the exclusionary urban growth that we have which is denying a large number of poor in the rural areas to put a foothold in the urban centres and also denying small and medium towns and backward regions to experience rapid economic and demographic growth. Now I think the second important point that I would like to mention is that there is likely to be a paradigm shift in the pattern of urbanisation. Since independence I would say 50s onwards we have noted that the relatively less developed states in India have recorded slightly higher urban growth rate. But this has changed in the 90s. We do find that developed states are recording higher demographic growth and as far as size class wise growth rates are concerned. I remember Dr. Rakesh Mohan was the first in the early 80s who tried to systematise the calculations. But we agreed that class one cities which is 100,000 plus population are experiencing slightly higher growth rate compared to small and medium towns and I would like to mention that this disparity in the growth rates have widened in the 90s is likely to go up in future years and disparity across districts, across regions and across size class of urban centres has become much higher, inequality has become much higher which is likely to go up and if you ask me what is the single major concern as far as the largest cities of India are concerned I would say that it is the significant deceleration in the growth rate of small and medium towns and even the number of census towns going down which has happened in the 91, 2000 census everything related to demography of India has recorded an increase but the number of census towns going down certainly is one of the major concerns I think for the future of the city.