Urban Centers Trend, Pattern and Key Challenges for Sustainability: Case of West Bengal, India

This paper focuses on number of aspects of urban centers of West Bengal. It shows that small and intermediate towns are negatively growing and big and large city are positively growing. Population share of small, intermediate and Million plus city is decreasing while it's increasing in case of big and large city. Therefore people are staying more in large city compare to million cities. It may be due to higher cost of living in million city while poor service and infrastructure in case of small and intermediate towns. Urban area both in percent and share has very high correlation with level of urbanization. Dispersion of urban population is also a remarkable and it is highly correlated with number of small scale industry units which helps to transform the small towns and surrounding rural areas economy. But lack of infrastructure in small and intermediate town is major problem and there is no major programme or strategy to develop small and intermediate town more attractive.