Rural-urban Transition and Food Security in India

As a growing proportion of world’s population lives in cities and towns, food security is increasingly acquiring an urban character. The locus of food security research and policy agendas has correspondingly expanded from rural areas to include urban centres in recent years. However, the dominant discourse on urbanization-food security relationship appears to be shaped by perspectives from the Global North and large cities, and disregards urbanization-food security nexus in small towns of the Global South. This paper aims to correct this bias. With a focus on India where urbanization is increasingly concentrated in small, former rural regions, this paper looks at the food security implications of country’s rural-urban transition and advances a conceptual framework to understand the food security impacts of peripheral urbanization.