Ahmedabad: Nine new municipal corporations in less than 15 years. City limits being redrawn. Satellite townships on the planning board. The administrative scramble revealed Gujarat’s new reality before the numbers could: the state is rapidly outgrowing its rural identity. Gujarat is now on track to become predominantly urban by next year, with projections showing that more than half its population will live in the cities for the first time.According to the state govt’s estimates in Socio-Economic Review 2025-26, Gujarat’s total population is expected to reach 7.48 crore in 2027, with 3.79 crore residing in urban areas and 3.69 crore in rural areas. That would place the urban share at 50.69%, marking a new threshold in the state’s demographic trajectory. The shift has been building for decades, urban planners say.In the 2011 Census, Gujarat’s urban population stood at 42.6%, already well above India’s 31.14%. The projected jump of roughly 8 percentage points between 2011 and 2027 outpaces the national trend over a comparable period.M Thennarasan, principal secretary in the urban development and urban housing department, said that urbanization is central to Gujarat’s economic future. Referring to a World Bank study, he noted that by 2050, between 67% and 70% of the population could be living in urban areas. He described cities as engines of economic growth, driven by services, education, infrastructure and planned development. He said that the state govt also declared the current year as “urban year” and increased the urban development budget to Rs 33,500 crore, with focus on better facilities, satellite townships and transit-oriented growth. The expansion of urban governance has kept pace. Gujarat had eight municipal corporations in 2011; that number has since risen to 17, with additions including Navsari, Vapi, Anand, Morbi and Gandhidham, among others. The total area under municipal corporations has grown to 481 square kilometres from 466 in 2011, and Ahmedabad is expected to expand further, with plans to extend city limits to Sanand, a major industrial hub on its outskirts.Urban planner Rutul Joshi of CEPT University said the trend has long been anticipated. “Gujarat was an industrial state since its formation, and with industrialisation comes urbanisation. The urban population was at its peak in Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Surat and Rajkot in 1980. Planners had expected the urban population to surpass the rural population by 2025.”The state govt’s longer-term projections indicate that by 2036, around 55% of Gujarat’s population will live in urban areas. In contrast, India is expected to remain predominantly rural even then, with 39.06% of the population in urban areas and 60.94% in rural areas.Gujarat’s urban population is growing at roughly 0.5% annually, ahead of the national rate of about 0.3%. Over the next 10 years, the state’s urban share is projected to rise by 4.3 percentage points, compared to about 2.7 percentage points for India, reflecting stronger migration to cities, industrial expansion and the spread of urban infrastructure.
