Rural and urban
How the census decides whether a place counts as a town or a village.
A place is urban if it has a municipality, corporation, cantonment or notified town area committee. It is also urban if it meets all three of: at least 5000 people, density of at least 400 per square kilometre, and at least 75 per cent of the male working population employed outside agriculture. Everything else is rural. A settlement can therefore grow substantially and remain rural in the records.
Where you will see this on the site
This term appears in the census tables reproduced across state, district, tehsil and village pages. How we source and handle those figures is set out on the about the data page.
Related terms
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Page last reviewed: August 2026. Back to the glossary