India is a country of villages which together contain slightly over 80 percent of the total population. This fact has led many thinkers to the conclusion that problems of development and democratic modernization lie solely in the so-called "self-sufficient" villages. Nothing could be furthel from the truth, especially in the context of the apparently irrevocable modernizing influences of the industrial and atomic age. It is generally forgotten that the scattered villages of India are becoming interspersed more and more, by small and big towns - potential "growth-points," to use the language of economists. At the same time there is a tendency to ignore the fact that the absence of integrated development in metropolises and cities in India has produced within their bounds, heterogeneous habitations of various kinds and dimensions which present another set of societal realities.
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