India’s Urban Future

India’s urban population is set to increase by half a billion over the next four decades (about one million a month) – the most massive shift to urbanization in world history this century. In light of India’s urbanization challenge and the stark transformations underfoot, CASI is launching comprehensive state‐of‐the‐art surveys on urban India. Specifically, this research has four core objectives:

• Create a representative urban survey across cities of different sizes in India

• Create an empirical foundation for developing smarter and more effective public policy with respect to urban India.

• Produce unique high‐quality data upon which serious, policy‐relevant academic scholarship can be built.

• Create a lasting public good—empirical data on urban India and, importantly, its changing nature over time.

The surveys will focus on core urban issues including housing, mobility (both migration and commuting), public services (with a special focus on slum dwellers, human capital & livelihoods and urban governance. The first surveys will focus on the metros (10 million +). Subsequently the goal is to expand the surveys to a sample of cities between one and ten million and then further down to smaller cities and towns.