New Delhi, Sept. 13 -- India's governance of settlements rests on a binary. The 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments created two tiers of local government: panchayats for rural areas and urban local bodies for urban areas, with no third category. The default is 'rural' unless a government notification states otherwise.

The Census sits uneasily within this binary because it recognizes something the Constitution does not: the Census town.

Alongside places that are administratively urban (statutory towns), it identifies Census towns based on a statistical test: a settlement with at least 5,000 people, a density of at least 400 people per square kilometre, and at least 75% of the male main working population engaged outside agriculture. ...