India’s urbanisation is rapidly extending beyond the boundaries of large, statutorily recognised cities, creating diverse spaces of rural-urban transition. By 2025, Nagar Panchayats, the only constitutionally recognised institution for ‘an area in transition from a rural area to an urban area’, had risen to 2,543, peri-urban settlements to over 300,000, and thousands of settlements emerged as functional urban areas spread across some 181 industrial-corridor districts.
