Suburbanization of Indian Cities: What is the Evidence from Gulbarga?

In this article, we make an attempt to understand the population and employment suburbanization of a mid-tier Indian city—Gulbarga, Karnataka. We estimate population and employment density gradients for the city for two periods and find the evidence of suburbanization. While we are unable to explain the suburbanization, our anecdotal examination of the ratio of unemployment rate in the central city to that of the suburbs indicate the suburbanization of the city due to central city blight. The effects of suburbanization were also seen from the spatial distribution of working population. Adopting the definition of monocentricity provided by Bertaud (2014), Gulbarga is polycentric.