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Indian Society craft manufacturing. If they are close enough, then they A ctivity 2.4 may travel daily to the nearest urban centre to work while continuing to live in the village. Do a small survey in Mass media and communication channels are now your school to find out bringing images of urban life styles and patterns of when (i.e., how many consumption into the rural areas. Consequently, urban generations ago) the norms and standards are becoming well known even in families of your fellow the remote villages, creating new desires and aspirations students came to live in your area or place where for consumption. Mass transit and mass communication are bridging the gap between the rural and urban areas. the school is located. Even in the past, the rural areas were never really beyond Tabulate the results and discuss them in class. the reach of market forces and today they are being more What does your survey closely integrated into the consumer market (The social role tell you about rural-urban of markets will be discussed in Chapter 4). migrations? Considered from an urban point of view, the rapid growth in urbanisation shows that the town or city has been acting as a magnet for the rural population. Those who cannot find work (or sufficient work) in the rural areas go to the city in search of work. This flow of rural-to-urban migration has also been accelerated by the continuous decline of common property resources like ponds, forests and grazing lands. These common resources enabled poor people to survive in the villages although they owned little or no land. Now, these resources have been turned into private property, or they are exhausted (Ponds may run dry or no longer provide enough fish; forests may have been cut down and have vanished…). If people no longer have access to these resources, but on the other hand have to buy many things in the market that they used to get free (like fuel, fodder or supplementary food items), then their hardship increases. This hardship is worsened by the fact that opportunities for earning cash income are limited in the villages. Sometimes the city may also be preferred for social reasons, specially the relative anonymity it offers. The fact that urban life involves interaction with strangers can be an advantage for different reasons. For the socially oppressed groups like the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, this may offer some partial protection from the daily humiliation they may suffer in the village where everyone knows their caste identity. The anonymity of the city also allows the poorer sections of the socially dominant rural groups to engage in low status work that they would not be able to do in the village. All these reasons make the city an attractive destination for the villagers. The swelling cities bear testimony to this flow of population. This is evident from the rapid rate of urbanisation in the post-Independence period. 30 While urbanisation has been occurring at a rapid pace, it is the biggest cities – the metropolises – that have been growing the fastest. These metros attract migrants from the rural areas as well as from small towns. There are Reprint 2026-27