All three changes come from the same two causes working together: more people living in the same place, and smaller households.
How to do this activity: ask two or three people of different ages — a parent, and a grandparent or an elderly neighbour. Ask them to describe the same street or field as it was when they were your age, and as it is now. Write down what they say in their own words, note roughly which years they are talking about, and only then look for the reasons.
| Change observed | Immediate reason | The demography behind it |
|---|---|---|
| Farmland and green spaces built over | More houses are needed on the same land | India went from 361 million people in 1951 to 1,460 million in 2025 — and migration concentrates that growth in and around towns |
| Crowded streets, more vehicles, traffic jams | More people, and more of them able to afford a vehicle | A large working-age population earning incomes; the chapter notes that concentrating people in a limited area strains transport |
| Smaller apartments, more single-family homes | Households have fewer members, and urban land is costly | Fertility fell from 5.7 (1950) to 1.9 (2025), so families are smaller; with rapid urbanisation “the cost of living is high particularly in cities, so people prefer to have smaller families” |
Sample answer: “My grandmother says that when she came to this locality in 1978 there were paddy fields behind our lane and only two buses a day. The fields are now three apartment blocks, and the lane is parked full of two-wheelers. She says her own family had seven people in one house; my family has four, and my cousins’ flat has three. The reasons seem to be that many more people now live here than before — some born here, many who came for work — and that each family is smaller than it used to be, so more, smaller homes are needed on the same amount of land.”