World Population

1 World Population
2 Population Composition
3 Human Development 

World Population

• Introduction
• Distribution
• Density
• Growth

Introduction

Population geography is a division of human geography. It is the study of the ways in which spatial variations in the distribution, composition, migration, and growth of populations are related to the nature of places. Population geography involves demography in a geographical perspective. It focuses on the characteristics of population distributions that change in a spatial context. This often involves factors such as where populations are found and how the size and composition of these populations is regulated by the demographic processes of fertility, mortality, and migration. Contributions to population geography are cross-disciplinary because geographical epistemologies related to environment, place and space have been developed at various times.

Human population refers to the number of people living in a particular area, from a village to the world as a whole. A secondary meaning of population is the inhabitants themselves, but in most uses population means numbers.

No one knows the population of the earliest humans, but there may have been only a few tens of thousands of individuals when the species Homo sapiens first emerged 200,000 years ago. Today more than 6 billion human beings inhabit the earth. Three-fifths of them live in one continent, Asia, with the rest occupying every continent except Antarctica.

Top Countries – 2019

FACTORS OF POPULATION

I. Geographical Factors

Climate

• Of all the climatic factors, twin elements of rainfall and temperature play the most important role in determining the population of an area. Man cannot go beyond the limits set by climate.
• Extremes of climate discourage the concentration of population. Such climates include the too cold climate of Himalayas, and the too hot and dry climate of the Thar Desert. A moderate climate, on the other hand, is favourable for population.
• People prefer to live in temperate climates where there is enough rainfall and no extremes of temperature.
• A lack of fresh water for drinking or irrigation stops people living in an area.
• Very high temperatures make farming difficult. Dehydration and heat stroke are other issues.
• Areas with high humidity are also uncomfortable places to live and can be affected by diseases such as malaria.
• Very cold temperatures make it difficult to grow crops or to build homes and transport links as the ground can be frozen for much of the year.
• Frostbite makes it difficult to work outside for any length of time, and protective clothing would need to be worn.

Relief

• plain areas encourage higher density of population as compared to mountain regions.
• The steep slope in mountain areas restrict the availability of land for agriculture, development of transport, industries and other economic activities which may tend to discourage concentration of population and its proper growth.
• Steep slopes make the use of machinery difficult.
• High, mountainous areas are too cold which makes it difficult to grow crops.
• Flat, low-lying areas have deeper soil which makes it easier to grow crops.

Natural resources

• Few natural resources, such as coal, in an area means there is a lack of industry and therefore a lack of employment opportunities.
• Scenery is a resource and can attract tourists, bringing job opportunities.

Soils

• Soil is an important factor in determining the density of population in an overwhelmingly agricultural countries.
• Fertile soil supports higher population density while infertile soil leads to low density.Areas with fertile soils, eg river deltas, are good for growing crops to feed the population.
• Poor soils with few nutrients mean there will be a low agricultural output.

II. Economic Factors

Countries who are in the early stages of economic development tend to have higher rates of population growth. In agriculturally based societies, children are seen as potential income earners. From an early age, they can help with household tasks and collecting the harvest. Also, in societies without state pensions, parents often want more children to act as an insurance for their old age. It is expected children will look after parents in old age. Because child mortality rates are often higher, therefore there is a need to have more children to ensure the parents have sufficient children to look after them in old age. Some of the dominant economic factors influencing population are as follows:

(i) Minerals: Areas

Places with deposits of mineral are naturally more populated. Diamond mines of South Africa and discovery of oil in the Middle East led to people settling down in these areas. In India, the areas of the Chhota Nagpur Plateau in Jharkhand and nearby areas of Odisha see a high population distribution because of the presence of huge mineral deposits.

(ii) Urbanisation

The growth in urban areas comes from both the increase in migration to the cities and the fertility of urban populations. Much of urban migration is driven by rural populations’ desire for the advantages that urban areas offer. Urban advantages include greater opportunities to receive education, health care, and services such as entertainment.

(iii) Industrialisation

The Industrial Revolution marked a major turning point in Earth’s ecology and humans’ relationship with their environment. The Industrial Revolution dramatically changed every aspect of human life and lifestyles. The impact on the world’s psyche would not begin to register until the early 1960s, some 200 years after its beginnings. From human development, health and life longevity, to social improvements and the impact on natural resources, public health, energy usage and sanitation, the effects were profound.

III. Social and Cultural Factors

Developing countries have strong social attachments to having large families. In the developed world, smaller families are the norm.

Dominant other social factors are as follows:

High marriage rates: Almost all mature women are married.

Early marriage: Virtually the whole range of reproductive years is available for childbearing.

Status of women: Few alternatives to the domestic role are available; the customary male dominance confines women to care of home and children.

Desire for children, especially sons: This may be for familial reasons (care of parents in their old age), economic reasons (workers in an agricultural economy), or status reasons (many sons implying a manly father). A wide range of social values has traditionally supported the appropriateness of the large family, especially when coupled with traditionally high mortality rates.

POPULATION DISTRIBUTION

This is shown here in a population cartogram: a geographical presentation of the world where the size of the countries are not drawn according to the distribution of land, but according to the distribution of people. The cartogram shows where in the world the global population was at home in 2018.

The cartogram is made up of squares, each of which represents half a million people of a country’s population. The 11.5 million Belgians are represented by 23 squares; the 49.5 million Colombians are represented by 99 squares; the 1.415 billion people in China are represented by 2830 squares; and the entire world population of 7.633 billion people in 2018 is represented by the total sum of 15,266 squares.

As the size of the population rather than the size of the territory is shown in this map you can see some big differences when you compare it to the standard geographical map we’re most familiar with. Small countries with a high population density increase in size in this cartogram relative to the world maps we are used to – look at Bangladesh, Taiwan, or the Netherlands. Large countries with a small population shrink in size (look for Canada, Mongolia, Australia, or Russia).

DENSITY OF POPULATION

Pattern of world population distribution is grouped into three. These are:

• The very densely populated parts of the world.
• The moderately populated parts of the world.
• The very sparsely populated parts of the world.

11.About 50% of the world population is concentrated between the latitudes of :[1997] (a)5°N and 20° N (b)20°N and 40°N (c)40ºN and 60ºN (d)20ºS and 40ºS
Ans. 11.(b)About 50% of the world population is concentrated between latitude of 20°N and 40°N, because most populous countries and areas like Asia, U.S.A, Europe and India lies with in this latitude.
32. Consider the following countries:[2002] 1.Brazil 2.Indonesia 3.Japan 4.Russia What is the descending order of the size of the following countries population-wise ? (a)1, 2, 4, 3 (b)2, 3, 1, 4 (c)2, 1, 4, 3 (d)1, 2, 3, 4
Ans. 32.(c)

THE VERY DENSELY  

• Industrial North-West Europe: This includes countries like Great Britain, France, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, etc. These areas are highly industrialized due to the presence of coal and iron.
• Industrial North-Eastern U.S.A: This is the great industrial belt of the United States and Canada stretching from the shore of the Great Lakes of Pittsburgh to New York which is very rich in coal and iron.
• Agricultural Monsoon Asia: This includes populous countries like China, Indian, Japan, Pakistan, Indonesia (particularly Java), etc. This is the area of the largest population concentration of the world, known for its fertile soils, warm climate and abundant rainfall which promote agriculture.
• The Nile Valley and Delta: This is essentially in Egypt. It is an area within the Sahara desert which through irrigation has converted a desert into an area of high agricultural activities and consequently high population.

MODERATELY POPULATED

• These include areas of cool temperate forest of Europe, Canada and Asia.
• The temperate and tropical grassland of southern continents.
• Agricultural U.S.A.
• Mediterranean Europe.
• Africa
• Most parts of South-East Asia.

VERY SPARSELY POPULATED 

• The cold polar lands of Arctic and Antarctica which are not inhabited due to cold weather.
• The Canadian and Eurasian tundra and Greenland also due to cold weather.
• The high mountains of Himalayas, Rockies and parts of Andes due to rugged relief and cold weather.
• The hot deserts of the world like Kalahari, Atacama, the Sahara, etc. due to hot weather and dryness with no rain.
• The dense tropical rain forest like the Amazon basin (South America), Congo (Zaire) basin (Central Africa). Both are uninhabited jungles.

The world’s population is around 7,500,000,000 and Earth’s total area (including land and water) is 510,000,000 square kilometers.Therefore, the worldwide human population density is around 7,500,000,000 ÷ 510,000,000 = 14.7 per km2.

If only the Earth’s land area of 150,000,000 km2 is taken into account, then human population density is 50 per km2 . This includes all continental and island land area, including Antarctica. If Antarctica is also excluded, then population density rises to over 55 people per km2.

75.Which one among the following South Asian countries has the highest population density? [2009] (a)India (b)Nepal (c)Pakistan (d)Sri Lanka
Ans. 75.(a)Overall population density of India is 324. Nepal is 102, Pakistan is 146, Sri Lanka is 280 person per square kilometers.

DENSITY OF POPULATION
With population under 10,000,000

With population above 10,000,000

Three types of density used in population geography.

• Arithmetic density    – is the number of people per square unit of land.
• Physiologic density   – is the number of people per square unit of farmland.
• Agricultural density – is the number of farmers per unit of farmland.

POPULATION GROWTH

The chart shows the increasing number of people living on our planet over the last 12,000 years. A mind-boggling change: The world population today that is 1,860-times the size of what it was 12 millennia ago when the world population was around 4 million – half of the current population of London.

What is striking about this chart is of course that almost all of this growth happened just very recently. Historical demographers estimate that around the year 1800 the world population was only around 1 billion people. This implies that on average the population grew very slowly over this long time from 10,000 BCE to 1700 (by 0.04% annually). After 1800 this changed fundamentally: The world population was around 1 billion in the year 1800 and increased 7-fold since then.

Around 108 billion people have ever lived on our planet. This means that today’s population size makes up 6.5% of the total number of people ever born.2

For the long period from the appearance of modern Homo sapiens up to the starting point of this chart in 10,000 BCE it is estimated that the total world population was often well under one million.3

In this period our species was often seriously threatened by extinction.

World population from 10,000 BC to today

The world population increased from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.7 billion today. The world population growth rate declined from 2.2% per year 50 years ago to 1.05% per year.

How has the world population growth rate changed?

In terms of recent developments, the data from the UN Population Division provides consistent and comparable estimates (and projections) within and across countries and time, over the last century. This data starts from estimates for 1950, and is updated periodically to reflect changes in fertility, mortality and international migration.

In the section above we looked at the absolute change in the global population over time. But what about the rate of population growth?

The global population growth rate peaked long ago. The chart shows that global population growth reached a peak in 1962 and 1963 with an annual growth rate of 2.2%; but since then, world population growth has halved.

For the last half-century we have lived in a world in which the population growth rate has been declining. The UN projects that this decline will continue in the coming decades.

A common question we’re asked is: is the global population growing exponentially? The answer is no. For population growth to be exponential, the growth rate would have be the same over time (e.g. 2% growth every year). In absolute terms, this would result in an exponential increase in the number of people. That’s because we’d be multiplying an ever-larger number of people by the same 2%. 2% of the population this year would be larger than 2% last year, and so on; this means the population would grow exponentially.

But, as we see in this chart, since the 1960s the growth rate has been falling. This means the world population is not growing exponentially – for decades now, growth has been more similar to a linear trend.

The absolute annual change of the population

The previous section looked at the growth rate. This visualization here shows the annual global population increase from 1950 to today and the projection until the end of this century.

The absolute increase of the population per year has peaked in the late 1980s at over 90 million additional people each year. But it stayed high until recently. From now on the UN expects the annual increase to decline by around 1 million every year.

Future population growth

Two centuries of rapid global population growth will come to an end

One of the big lessons from the demographic history of countries is that population explosions are temporary. For many countries the demographic transition has already ended, and as the global fertility rate has now halved we know that the world as a whole is approaching the end of rapid population growth.

This visualization presents this big overview of the global demographic transition – with the very latest data from the UN Population Division just published.

As we explore at the beginning of the entry on population growth, the global population grew only very slowly up to 1700 – only 0.04% per year. In the many millennia up to that point in history very high mortality of children counteracted high fertility. The world was in the first stage of the demographic transition.

Once health improved and mortality declined things changed quickly. Particularly over the course of the 20th century: Over the last 100 years global population more than quadrupled. As we see in the chart, the rise of the global population got steeper and steeper and you have just lived through the steepest increase of that curve. This also means that your existence is a tiny part of the reason why that curve is so steep.

The 7-fold increase of the world population over the course of two centuries amplified humanity’s impact on the natural environment. To provide space, food, and resources for a large world population in a way that is sustainable into the distant future is without question one of the large, serious challenges for our generation. We should not make the mistake of underestimating the task ahead of us. Yes, I expect new generations to contribute, but for now it is upon us to provide for them. Population growth is still fast: Every year 140 million are born and 58 million die – the difference is the number of people that we add to the world population in a year: 82 million.

Where do we go from here?

In red you see the annual population growth rate (that is, the percentage change in population per year) of the global population. It peaked around half a century ago. Peak population growth was reached in 1968 with an annual growth of 2.1%. Since then the increase of the world population has slowed and today grows by just over 1% per year. This slowdown of population growth was not only predictable, but predicted. Just as expected by demographers (here), the world as a whole is experiencing the closing of a massive demographic transition.

This chart also shows how the United Nations envision the slow ending of the global demographic transition. As population growth continues to decline, the curve representing the world population is getting less and less steep. By the end of the century – when global population growth will have fallen to 0.1% according to the UN’s projection – the world will be very close to the end of the demographic transition. It is hard to know the population dynamics beyond 2100; it will depend upon the fertility rate and as we discuss in our entry on fertility rates here fertility is first falling with development – and then rising with development. The question will be whether it will rise above an average 2 children per woman.

The world enters the last phase of the demographic transition and this means we will not repeat the past. The global population has quadrupled over the course of the 20th century, but it will not double anymore over the course of this century.

The world population will reach a size, which compared to humanity’s history, will be extraordinary; if the UN projections are accurate (they have a good track record), the world population will have increased more than 10-fold over the span of 250 years.

We are on the way to a new balance. The big global demographic transition that the world entered more than two centuries ago is then coming to an end: This new equilibrium is different from the one in the past when it was the very high mortality that kept population growth in check. In the new balance it will be low fertility keeps population changes small.

Facts related to Population Growth

• Global human population growth amounts to around 83 million annually, or 1.1% per year.
• The global population has grown from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.616 billion in 2018. It is expected to keep growing, and estimates have put the total population at 8.6 billion by mid-2030, 9.8 billion by mid-2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100.
• Many nations with rapid population growth have low standards of living, whereas many nations with low rates of population growth have high standards of living.200 years ago there were less than one billion humans living on earth.
• Today, according to UN calculations there are over 7 billion of us. Between 1900 and 2000, the increase in world population was three times greater than during the entire previous history of humanity—an increase from 1.5 to 6.1 billion in just 100 years.

POPULATION GROWTH
(ANNUAL %) Top +

Top –

Population Change

Components of Population Change

There are three components of population change

*Births *Deaths *Migration

Birth rates

• The birth rate (technically, births/population rate) is the total number of live births per 1,000 in a population in a year or period.
• The crude birth rate is the number of live births per year per 1,000 mid-year population.
• When the crude death rate is subtracted from the crude birth rate, the result is the rate of natural increase (RNI).This is equal to the rate of population change (excluding migration).
• The average global birth rate is 18.5 births per 1,000 total population in 2016.In 2012 the average global birth rate was 19.611 according to the World Bank and 19.15 births per 1,000 total population according to the CIA, compared to 20.09 per 1,000 total population in 2007.

World historical and projected crude birth rates (1950–2050)

UN, normal variant, 2009 rev.

Mortality rate, or death rate

Mortality rate, or death rate, is a measure of the number of deaths (in general, or due to a specific cause) in a particular population, scaled to the size of that population, per unit of time. Mortality rate is typically expressed in units of deaths per 1,000 individuals per year; thus, a mortality rate of 9.5 (out of 1,000) in a population of 1,000 would mean 9.5 deaths per year in that entire population, or 0.95% out of the total. It is distinct from “morbidity”, which is either the prevalence or incidence of a disease, and also from the incidence rate (the number of newly appearing cases of the disease per unit of time).

37.Life expectancy is the highest in the world in :[2003] (a)Canada (b)Germany (c)Japan (d)Norway
Ans. 37.(c)Life expectancy in Canada is 79.7 years, Germany – 77.8 years, Japan – 80.9, Norway – 78.9 years. Japan has the highest life expectancy in the world.

World historical and predicted crude death rates (1950–2050)

UN, medium variant, 2012 rev.

Crude death rate (per thousand per year) by country (2006)

Migration

• Human migration is the movement by people from one place to another with the intentions of settling, permanently or temporarily in a new location.
• The net migration rate is the difference between the number of immigrants (people coming into an area) and the number of emigrants (people leaving an area) throughout the year.
• When the number of immigrants is larger than the number of emigrants, a positive net migration rate occurs.
• A positive net migration rates indicates that there are more people entering than leaving an area.
• When more emigrate from a country, the result is a negative net migration rate, meaning that more people are leaving than entering the area. When there is an equal number of immigrants and emigrants, the net migration rate is balanced.

There are two sets of factors that influence migration.

The Push factors

Push factors may include conflict, drought, famine, or extreme religious activity. Poor economic activity and lack of job opportunities are also strong push factors for migration.

The Pull factors

Better infrastructure that results in inadequate facilities and services. Better healthcare and medical facilities such as hospitals. Better job and educational opportunities. Lower crime rates as a result of a combination of generally higher living standards and better, less corrupt, and more efficient police force. Democratic political stability. A generally higher standard of living.

Demographic transition

Demographic transition (DT) is the transition from high birth and death rates to lower birth and death rates as a country or region develops from a pre-industrial to an industrialized economic system. The theory was proposed in 1929 by the American demographer Warren Thompson, who observed changes, or transitions, in birth and death rates in industrialized societies over the previous 200 years. Most developed countries have completed the demographic transition and have low birth rates; most developing countries are in the process of this transition. The major (relative) exceptions are some poor countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and some Middle Eastern countries, which are poor or affected by government policy or civil strife, notably, Pakistan, Palestinian territories, Yemen, and Afghanistan.

The transition involves four stages, or possibly five.

• In stage one, pre-industrial society, death rates and birth rates are high and roughly in balance. All human populations are believed to have had this balance until the late 18th century, when this balance ended in Western Europe.
• In stage two, that of a developing country, the death rates drop quickly due to improvements in food supply and sanitation, which increase life expectancies and reduce disease. The improvements specific to food supply typically include selective breeding and crop rotation and farming techniques.
• In stage three, birth rates fall due to various fertility factors such as access to contraception, increases in wages, urbanization, a reduction in subsistence agriculture, an increase in the status and education of women, a reduction in the value of children’s work, an increase in parental investment in the education of children and other social changes. Population growth begins to level off.
• During stage four there are both low birth rates and low death rates. Birth rates may drop to well below replacement level as has happened in countries like Germany, Italy, and Japan, leading to a shrinking population, a threat to many industries that rely on population growth. As the large group born during stage two ages, it creates an economic burden on the shrinking working population. Death rates may remain consistently low or increase slightly due to increases in lifestyle diseases due to low exercise levels and high obesity and an aging population in developed countries. By the late 20th century, birth rates and death rates in developed countries leveled off at lower rates.
• Some scholars break out, from stage four, a “stage five” of below-replacement fertility levels. Others hypothesize a different “stage five” involving an increase in fertility.

Population Composition

Population composition is the description of a population according to characteristics such as age and sex. These data are often compared over time using population pyramids.

• SEX COMPOSITION
• AGE STRUCTURE
• RURAL URBAN COMPOSITION
• LITERACY
• OCCUPATIONAL STRUCTURE

SEX COMPOSITION

The sex ratio is the ratio of males to females in a population. Sex composition of the human population is one of the basic demographic characteristics, which is extremely vital for any meaningful demographic analysis. Changes in sex composition largely reflects the underlying socio-economic and cultural patterns of a society in different ways. Sex ratio defined here as the number of females per 1000 males in the population, is an important social indicator to measure the extent of prevailing equity between males and females in a society at a given point of time. It is mainly the outcome of the interplay of sex differentials in mortality, sex selective migration, sex ratio at birth and at times the sex differential in population enumeration.

Like most sexual species, the sex ratio in humans is approximately 1:1. Due to higher female fetal mortality, the sex ratio at birth worldwide is commonly thought to be 107 boys to 100 girls.

The sex ratio for the entire world population is 102 males to 100 females (2017 est.). Depending upon which definition is used, between 0.1% and 1.7% of live births are intersex.

AGE STRUCTURE

A population pyramid, also called an “age-sex pyramid”, is a graphical illustration that shows the distribution of various age groups in a population (typically that of a country or region of the world), which forms the shape of a pyramid when the population is growing. Males are conventionally shown on the left and females on the right, and they may be measured by raw number or as a percentage of the total population. This tool can be used to visualize and age of a particular population. It is also used in ecology to determine the overall age distribution of a population; an indication of the reproductive capabilities and likelihood of the continuation of a species.

73.For India, China, UK and USA, which one of the following is the correct sequence of the median age of their population?[2008] (a)China<India

This characteristic is as simple as it sounds: it’s a summary of the number of individuals of each age in the population. Age structure is useful in understanding and predicting population growth.

Each country will have different or unique population pyramids. However, population pyramids will be defined as the following: stationary, expansive, or constrictive. These types have been identified by the fertility and mortality rates of a country.

Stationary pyramid

A pyramid can be described as stationary if the percentages of population (age and sex) remains constant over time. Stationary population is when a population contains equal birth rates and death rates.

Expansive pyramid

A population pyramid that is very wide at the younger ages, characteristic of countries with high birth rate and low life expectancy. The population is said to be fast-growing, and the size of each birth cohort gets larger than the size of the previous year.

Constrictive pyramid

A population pyramid that is narrowed at the bottom. The population is generally older on average, as the country has long life expectancy, a low death rate, but also a low birth rate. However, the percentage of younger population are extremely low, this can cause issues with dependency ratio of the population. This pyramid is more common when immigrants are factored out. This is a typical pattern for a very developed country, a high level of education, easy access to and incentive to use birth control, good health care, and few negative environmental factors.

RURAL URBAN COMPOSITION

Percentage of rural population is higher in farm-based agricultural countries, while industrially developed regions have higher share of urban population. North America is the most urbanised continent. This division is necessary because rural and urban life styles differ from each other in terms of their livelihood and social conditions. The age-sex-occupational structure, density of population and level of development vary between rural and urban areas.

LITERACY

Dictionaries traditionally define literacy as the ability to read and write.Literacy is a key skill and a key measure of a population’s education. In the modern world, this is one way of interpreting literacy. One more broad interpretation sees literacy as knowledge and competence in a specific area.

Available global data indicates significant variations in literacy rates between world regions. North America, Europe, West Asia, and Central Asia have achieved almost full adult literacy (individuals at or over the age of 15) for both men and women. Most countries in East Asia and the Pacific, as well as Latin America and the Caribbean, are above a 90% literacy rate for adults.

Illiteracy persists to a greater extent in other regions: 2013 UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) data indicates adult literacy rates of only, 67.55% in South Asia and North Africa, 59.76% in Sub-Saharan Africa.

From a historical perspective, literacy levels for the world population have risen drastically in the last couple of centuries. While only 12% of the people in the world could read and write in 1820, today the share has reversed: only 17% of the world population remains illiterate. Over the last 65 years the global literacy rate increased by 4% every 5 years – from 42% in 1960 to 86% in 2015.

OCCUPATIONAL STRUCTURE

Occupational structure also influences the socio-economic development of an area. The spatial distribution of working and non-working population has been studied on the basis of data provided by the Census of India. There is a close relationship between the development of an economy and the occupational structure.

The working population (i.e. women and men of the age group – 15 to 59) take part in various occupations ranging from agriculture, forestry, fishing, manufacturing construction, commercial transport, services, communication and other unclassified services.

Colin Clark in his book “Conditions of Economic Progress” is of the view that there is a close relationship between economic development and occupational structure of a country. According to him, a higher per capita income is always associated with a higher proportion of the working population employed in tertiary industries while a low per capita income is always associated with a low proportion of working force employed in tertiary sector.

Otherwise speaking if the per capita real income of a country is low, the proportion of working population engaged in agriculture is high. For instance in the U.S.A. the per capita income was 2500 dollar in 1960. While 7% population was engaged in agriculture, 36% in industry and 57% in service sector.

Human Development

Human development is defined as the process of enlarging people’s freedoms and opportunities and improving their well-being. Human development is about the real freedom ordinary people have to decide who to be, what to do, and how to live. The human development concept was developed by economist Mahbub ul Haq.

• Growth and development
• Measure of human development
• Pillars of human development
• The Human Development Index (HDI)

GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT

Economic growth means an increase in real national income / national output.

Economic development means an improvement in the quality of life and living standards, e.g. measures of literacy, life-expectancy and health care.

Measure of human development

One measure of human development is the Human Development Index (HDI), formulated by the United Nations Development Programme.

The index encompasses statistics such as:

• Life expectancy at birth.
• Education index.
• Gross national income per capital.

Though this index does not capture every aspect that contributes to human capability, it is a standardized way of quantifying human capability across nations and communities. Aspects that could be left out of the calculations include incomes that are unable to be quantified, such as staying home to raise children or bartering goods/services, as well as individuals’ perceptions of their own well being. Other measures of human development include the Human Poverty Index (HPI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure. It measures many aspects of development.

New method of Measurement (2010 Index onwards)

Published on 4 November 2010 (and updated on 10 June 2011), the 2010 Human Development Report calculated the HDI combining three dimensions:

A long and healthy life: Life expectancy at birth

Education index: Mean years of schooling and Expected years of schooling

A decent standard of living: GNI per capita (PPP US$)

In its 2010 Human Development Report, the UNDP began using a new method of calculating the HDI. The following three indices are used:

1. Life Expectancy Index (LEI) ={LE-20}/{85-20}

LEI is 1 when Life expectancy at birth is 85 and 0 when Life expectancy at birth is 20.

2. Education Index (EI) = {MYSI}+{EYSI}/2

2.1 Mean Years of Schooling Index (MYSI) = {MYS}/15

Fifteen is the projected maximum of this indicator for 2025.

2.2 Expected Years of Schooling Index (EYSI) = {EYS}/{18}

Eighteen is equivalent to achieving a master’s degree in most countries.

II is 1 when GNI per capita is $75,000 and 0 when GNI per capita is $100.

Finally, the HDI is the geometric mean of the previous three normalized indices:

LE: Life expectancy at birth

MYS: Mean years of schooling (i.e. years that a person aged 25 or older has spent in formal education)

EYS: Expected years of schooling (i.e. total expected years of schooling for children under 18 years of age)

GNIpc: Gross national income at purchasing power parity per capita

Pillars of human development

There are six basic pillars of human development: equity, sustainability, productivity, empowerment, cooperation and security.

• Equity is the idea of fairness for every person, between men and women; we each have the right to education and health care.
• Sustainability is the view that we all have the right to earn a living that can sustain our lives and have access to a more even distribution of goods.
• Productivity states the full participation of people in the process of income generation. This also means that the government needs more efficient social programs for its people.
• Empowerment is the freedom of the people to influence development and decisions that affect their lives.
• Cooperation stipulates participation and belonging to communities and groups as a means of mutual enrichment and a source of social meaning.
• Security offers people development opportunities freely and safely with confidence that they will not disappear suddenly in the future.

The Human Development Index (HDI) is the normalized measure of life expectancy, education and per capita income for countries worldwide. It is an improved standard means of measuring well-being, especially child welfare and thus human development. Although this index makes an effort to simplify human development, it is much more complex than any index or set of indicators.

Life expectancy

Education

Per capita income

The 2007 report showed a small increase in world HDI in comparison with the previous year’s report. This rise was fueled by a general improvement in the developing world, especially of the least developed countries group. This marked improvement at the bottom was offset with a decrease in HDI of high income countries.

The Human Development Index (HDI) – 2018

.

View larger map

Urbanisation

More than half of the world’s population now live in urban areas — increasingly in highly-dense cities. However, urban settings are a relatively new phenomenon in human history. This transition has transformed the way we live, work, travel and build networks.

This entry presents an overview of urbanization across the world, extending from the distant past, to present, and projections of future trends.

More than 4 billion people – more than half of the world – live in urban areas

For most of human history, most people across the world lived in small communities. Over the past few centuries – and particularly in recent decades – this has shifted dramatically. There has been a mass migration of populations from rural to urban areas.
How many people live in urban areas today?
In the visualization we see estimates from the UN World Urbanization Prospects on the number of people globally who live in urban and rural areas. In 2017, 4.1 billion people were living in urban areas.
This means over half of the world (55%) live in urban settings. The UN estimates this milestone event – when the number of people in urban areas overtook the number in rural settings – occurred in 2007.
You can explore the data on urban and rural populations for any country or region using the “change country” toggle on the interactive chart.

Share of populations living in urban areas

In the map shown here we see the share of the population that is urbanized across the world.

Across most high-income countries – across Western Europe, the Americas, Australia, Japan and the Middle East – more than 80% of the population live in urban areas. Across most upper-middle income countries – in Eastern Europe, East Asia, North and Southern Africa, and South America – between 50% to 80% of people do. In many low to lower-middle income countries, the majority still live in rural areas.

But this is changing quickly. By clicking on any country you can see how urbanization rates are changing with time. For many countries, you see a rapid migration of populations into towns and cities.

How urban is the world?

What we know about urban populations and why it matters

Before looking in more detail at the differences in estimates of urban populations, we should first clarify what we do know:

• globally more people live in urbanized settings than not (disputes in these figures are all above the 50 percent urban mark);
• the broad distribution and density of where people live across the world (sometimes at very high resolution);
• although it can seem like our expanding cities take up a lot of land, only around 1% of global landis defined as built-up area;¹
• rates of urbanization have been increasing rapidly across all regions (in 1800, less than 10 percent of people across all regions lived in urban areas);
• urbanization is expected to continue to increase with rising incomes and shifts away from employment in agriculture;²
• disagreements in urban population numbers arise from definition or boundary differences in what makes a population ‘urban’.

Whilst disagreement on the numbers can seem irrelevant, understanding cities, urbanization rates, the distribution and density of people matters. The allocation and distribution of resources — ranging from housing and transport access to healthcare, education, and employment opportunities — should all be dependent on where people live. Understanding the distribution of people in a given country is essential to make sure the appropriate resources and services are available where they’re needed.

The UN’s 11th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) is to “make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable“. If our aim is to develop resource-efficient, inclusive cities, understanding how many people they must provide for is essential for urban planning.

Let’s therefore look at the conflicting estimates of how urban our world is, and where these differences come from.

UN estimates: 55% of people live in urban areas

At first glance this seems like a simple question to answer. Figures reported from the United Nations (UN) deliver a straightforward answer.

In the chart below we see the total number of people defined as living in urban and rural areas, extending from 1960 to 2016.⁴ This is based on nationally-collated census figures, combined with UN estimates where census data is unavailable. Here we see that in 1960 twice as many people lived in rural settings (2 billion) than in urban areas (1 billion). In 2007, urban and rural populations were almost exactly equal at 3.33 billion each. In 2016, urban populations increased to 4 billion; while the world’s rural population had increased only marginally to 3.4 billion.

UN estimates therefore report that 54 percent of people in the world lived in urban areas in 2016. Using UN Urbanization Prospects projections, in 2018 this is estimated to be just over 55 percent of the world.

How is an urban area defined?

There is no universal definition of what constitutes an ‘urban area’. Definitions of an urban settlement vary widely across countries, both in terms of the metrics used to define them, and their threshold level. The UN World Urbanization Prospects (2018) database provides a downloadable list of underlying data sources and the statistical concepts used to define ‘urban’ by country.
In the chart we have mapped the minimum threshold level of the number of inhabitants in a settlement needed for it to be classified as an ‘urban area’. The data shown for a given country is its nationally-defined minimum threshold. When we look at the frequency at which a given threshold level is used by a country, we see that 2000 and 5000 inhabitants are the most frequently adopted (by 23 countries each). However, these ranges vary widely: Sweden and Denmark, for example, use a threshold of only 200 inhabitants whereas Japan adopts a very high threshold of 50,000 inhabitants.
Note that 133 countries do not use a minimum settlement population threshold in their ‘urban’ definition. Some use a variation of population density, infrastructure development, pre-assigned city populations, or in some cases no clear definition.
The UN adopts national definitions in its reporting of urban versus rural populations. This means urban populations are often not comparable across countries. Global urbanization trends also encounter this issue: world urban population is reported as the sum of nationally-defined urban populations (therefore summing metrics/thresholds which are not directly comparable).

Argentina
Localities with 2,000 inhabitants or more.
Sweden
Built-up areas with 200 inhabitants or more and where houses are at most 200 metres apart.
Japan
Cities defined as shi. In general, shi refers to a municipality that satisfies the following conditions: (1) 50,000 inhabitants or more; (2) 60 per cent or more of the houses located in the main built-up areas; (3) 60 per cent or more of the population (including their dependents) engaged in manufacturing, trade or other urban type of business.
India
Statutory places with a municipality, corporation, cantonment board or notified town area committee and places satisfying all of the following three criteria: (1) 5,000 inhabitants or more; (2) at least 75 per cent of male working population engaged in non-agricultural pursuits; and (3) at least 400 inhabitants per square kilometre.
Zimbabwe
Places officially designated as urban, as well as places with 2,500 inhabitants or more whose population resides in a compact settlement pattern and where more than 50 per cent of the employed persons are engaged in non-agricultural occupations.
Singapore
Entire population.

Urban density

Urban agglomerations
Although the definition of ‘urban’ gives us some indication of population densities, it does not differentiate between those that live in small versus large urban settings. In the chart we show the percentage of the total population which live in agglomerations greater than one million people (i.e. large urban agglomerations).
Here we see large differences across the world. Smaller city-based nations such as Kuwait, UAE, Japan, Puerto Rico and Israel tend to have high rates of large urban agglomeration: more than half live in large cities. Across much of the Americas, 40 to 50 percent live in large urban agglomerations. Most other countries across Europe, Asia and Africa lie somewhere in the range of 10 to 40 percent.
There are a few countries which have a very low prevalence of large cities — in Germany and the Netherlands, for example, less than 10 percent of the population live in cities over 1 million despite having large urbanisation rates.

Population in largest city

We can also look at this centralisation effect through the share of the urban population which lives in the single largest city. This is shown in chart.

Here we have a handful of countries — such as Mongolia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Liberia, Senegal and Afghanistan — where more than half of the country’s urban population live in its largest city. Overall, this share tends to be higher in countries across Africa and Latin America; a share of 30 to 50 percent is common. Rates across Europe, Asia and North America are highly variable, ranging from over 40 percent to less than 10 percent.

Population of the capital city
In the chart we see the world mapped based on the population of each country’s capital city. In 2018, Japan’s capital — Tokyo — had the largest population of the world’s capital cities at over 37 million people. This was followed by Delhi (India) at over 28 million; Mexico City (Mexico) at 21 million; and Cairo (Egypt) with 20 million.

Across the world the most common capital size was in the range of 1 to 5 million people.

Population of cities

Many cities across the world have grown rapidly over the past 50 years in terms of total population. The chart shows the estimated population of the world’s 30 largest cities (by 2015 population) from 1950 to 2015, with projections through to 2035.9

Beijing in 1950, for example, had a population of 1.7 million. By 2015 this was more than 10 times higher, at more than 18 million. By 2035 it’s expected this will increase further to 25 million. Dhaka (capital of Bangladesh) increased from less than half a million in 1950 to almost 18 million in 2015 (and projected to reach 31 million by 2030). Using the “change city” in the bottom-left of the chart, you can browse trends for the largest 30 cities.

Long-run history of urbanization

Urbanization over the past 500 years

Migration to towns and cities is very recent – mostly limited to the past 200 years

How has urbanization changed over longer timescales – over the past 500 years?

In the map here we see how the share of populations living in urban areas has changed in recent curies. Data on urban shares dating back to 1500 are available only for select countries, with an estimated share at the global level. Using the timeline on the map (or by clicking on a country) you can see how this share has changed over time.

Here we see clearly again that urbanization has largely been confined to the past 200 years. By 1800, still over 90 percent of the global (and country-level) population lived in rural areas. Urbanization in the United States began to increase rapidly through the 19th century, reaching 40 percent by 1900.

By 1950 this reached 64%, and nearly 80% by 2000.

This rate of urbanization was, however, outpaced by Japan. Urban shares in Japan were low until the 20th century.

By 1900, it had just surpassed 1-in-10. This increased rapidly, reaching over half of the population by 1950; nearly 80 percent by 2000, and surpassing the USA to over 90 percent today.

China and India had not dissimilar rates of urbanization until the late 1980s. By then, both had around 1-in-4 living in urban areas. However, China’s rate of urbanization increased rapidly over the 1990s, and 2000s. Over this 30-year period its urban share more than doubled to 58 percent. India’s rise has continued to steadily rise to 1-in-3 (33 percent) today.

Urbanization over the past 12,000 years

The recency of urbanization becomes even more pronounced when we look at trends for countries and regions over even longer timescales – the past 10,000 years. This is shown in the visualization here, derived from the work of the History Database of the Global Environment.

As we see, urban living is a very recent development. For most of our history humans lived in low-density, rural settings. Prior to 1600, it’s estimated that the share of the world population living in urban settings did not reach 5%. By 1800, this share reached 7%; and by 1900 had increased to 16%.

Future urbanization

By 2050, more than two-thirds of the world will live in urban areas
The past 50 years in particular have seen a rapid increase in rates of urbanization across the world. Are these trends likely to continue?

The UN World Urbanization Prospects provides estimates of urban shares across the world through to 2050. These projections are shown in the chart — using the timeline you can watch this change over time.

Across all countries urban shares are projected to increase in the coming decades, although at varied rates. By 2050, it’s projected that 68 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas (an increase from 54 percent in 2016). In fact, by 2050 there are very few countries where rural shares are expected to be higher than urban. These include several across Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Pacific Island States, and Guyana in Latin America.

Why, when most countries are expected to be majority urban, does the global total just over two-thirds? This seems low, but results from the fact that many of the world’s most populated countries have comparably low urban shares (either just over half, or less). For example, India (expected to be the world’s most populous country), is projected to have an urban share of only 53 percent in 2050.

The other map shown here provides a snapshot overview of how the world is expected to continue to become more urbanized. It shows, for any given country, whether more people (the majority) live in urban or rural areas.

Using the timeline feature and “play” button in the bottom-left of the chart, you can explore how this has changed over time. In 1950, it was predominantly high-income countries across Europe, the Americas, Australasia and Japan who were largely urban. A century later — in 2050 — it’s projected that most countries will have more people living in urban areas than not.

How many people will live in urban areas in the future?

By 2050, close to 7 billion people are projected to live in urban areas

In the chart we see estimates of urban and rural populations in absolute terms, projected through to 2050. Projected population growth based on the UN’s medium fertility scenario. As of 2018 we see that there is around 7.6 billion people in the world (4.2 billion in urban and 3.4 billion in rural areas).

By 2050, global population is projected to increase to around 9.8 billion. It’s estimated that more than twice as many people in the world will be living in urban (6.7 billion) than in rural settings (3.1 billion).

These trends can be explored by country or region using the “change country” function in the bottom-left of the chart.

Using our timeline map of urbanization you can explore how countries are expected to transition from predominantly rural to urban in the coming decades. There we see that by 2050 it’s projected that the majority of countries will have a majority (greater than 50 percent) of people living in urban areas.

Urbanisation Problems

.

View larger map

Human Settlements

Introduction
Types and Patterns
Rural Settlements
Urban Settlements

Introduction

In geography, a settlement, locality or populated place is a community in which people live. The complexity of a settlement can range from a small number of dwellings grouped together to the largest of cities with surrounding urbanized areas. Settlements may include hamlets, villages, towns and cities. A settlement may have known historical properties such as the date or era in which it was first settled, or first settled by particular people.

A settlement conventionally includes its constructed facilities such as roads, enclosures, field systems, boundary banks and ditches, ponds, parks and woods, wind and water mills, manor houses, moats and churches.

The oldest remains that have been found of constructed dwellings are remains of huts that were made of mud and branches around 17,000 BC at the Ohalo site (now underwater) near the edge of the Sea of Galilee. The Natufians built houses, also in the Levant, around 10,000 BC. Remains of settlements such as villages become much more common after the invention of agriculture.

TYPES AND PATTERNS

A settlement pattern refers to the shape of the settlement as seen from above. The shapes of early settlements were influenced by the surrounding landscape. They were also shaped by other factors such as who owned the land and whether the land was good for building on or not. Some examples of settlement patterns include, nucleated settlements, linear settlements and dispersed settlements.

The major types classified by shape are:

(i) Compact or Nucleated settlements: Nucleated settlements are ones where the houses are grouped closely together, often around a central feature like a church, pub or village green. New settlements that are planned often have a nucleated pattern.

(ii) Dispersed Settlements: Dispersed settlements are ones where the houses are spread out over a wide area. They are often the homes of farmers and can be found in rural areas.

Rural Settlements

The definition of a rural settlement depends on the country. In some countries, a rural settlement is any settlement in the areas defined as rural by a governmental office, e.g., by the national census bureau. This may include even rural towns. In some others, rural settlements traditionally do not include towns.

Common types of rural settlements are villages, hamlets and farms.

Traditionally, rural settlements were associated with agriculture. In modern times other types of rural communities have been developed .

Types of Rural Settlements

On the basis of number of villages, hamlets and number of occupancy units, R.B. Singh identified four settlements. They are (i) compact, (ii) semi-compact, (iii) hamleted and (iv) dispersed or scattered type.

(i) Compact settlements:

If the number of villages equals the number of hamlets in an area unit, the settlement is designated as compact. Such settlements are found throughout the plateau region of Malwa, in the Narmada Valley, Nimar upland, large parts of Rajasthan, paddy lands in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Vindhyan Plateau and several other cultivated parts of India.

In such villages all the dwellings are concentrated in one central site. The inhabitants of the village live together and enjoy the benefits of community life. Such settlements range from a cluster of about thirty to hundreds of dwellings of different forms, sizes and functions. Their size varies from 500 to 2,500 persons in sparsely populated parts like Rajasthan to more than 10,000 in the Ganga plain.

(ii) Semi-compact settlements:

If the number of villages equals more than half of the hamlets, it is semi-compact settlement. These are found both in plains and plateaus depending upon the environmental conditions prevailing there. The dwellings in such settlements are not very closely knitted and are huddled together at one common site. It covers more area than the compact settlements; the hamlets occupy new sites near the periphery of the village boundary.

(iii) Hamleted settlements:

If the number of villages is equal to half of hamlet number, it is a hamlet settlement. The hamlets are spread over the area with intervening fields and the main or central settlement is either absent or has feeble influence upon others. Often the original site is not easily distinguishable and the morphological diversity is rarely noticed. Such settlements are found in West Bengal, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and coastal plains.

(iv) Dispersed settlements:

If the number of villages is less than half the number of hamlets, the settlement is regarded as dispersed. The inhabitants of dispersed settlements live in isolated dwellings scattered in the cultivated fields. Individualism, sentiments of living freely, custom of .marriage relations are conducive to such settlements. Dispersed settlements are found in tribal areas covering central part of India, eastern and southern Rajasthan, Himalayan slopes and land with dissected and uneven topography. Homesteads or farmsteads of wheat producing areas in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh also belong to this category.

On the basis of forms or shapes settlements may be a number of geometrical forms and shapes such as Linear, rectangular, circular star like, T-shaped village, double village, cross-shaped village etc.

(a) Linear pattern: Linear settlements are settlements where the buildings are constructed in lines, often next to a geographical feature like a lake shore, a river or following a road.

Where linear settlements follow a road, the road often predates the settlement.

(b) Rectangular pattern: Such patterns of rural settlements are found in plain areas or wide inter montane valleys. The roads are rectangular and cut each other at right angles.

(c) Circular pattern: Circular villages develop around lakes, tanks and sometimes the village is planned in such a way that the central part remains open and is used for keeping the animals to protect them from wild animals.

(d) Star like pattern: Where several roads converge, star shaped settlements develop

by the houses built along the roads.

(e) T-shaped, Y-shaped, Cross-shaped or cruciform settlements: T -shaped settlements develop at tri-junctions of the roads while shaped settlements emerge as the places where

two roads converge on the third one and houses are built along these roads. Cruciform settlements develop on the cross-roads and houses extend in all the four direction.

Urban Settlements

An Urban settlement is a concentrated settlement that constitutes or is part of an urban area. It is an area with high density of human-created structures.These geometrical patterns are usually in squares and rectangles and are well laid out.

Significant increase in the percentage of the global urban population can be traced in the 1st millennium BCE. Another significant increase can be traced to Mughal India, where 15% of its population lived in urban centers during the 16th–17th centuries, higher than in Europe at the time. In comparison, the percentage of the European population living in cities was 8–13% in 1800.

With the onset of the British agricultural and industrial revolution in the late 18th century, this relationship was finally broken and an unprecedented growth in urban population took place over the course of the 19th century, both through continued migration from the countryside and due to the tremendous demographic expansion that occurred at that time. In England and Wales, the proportion of the population living in cities with more than 20,000 people jumped from 17% in 1801 to 54% in 1891. Moreover, and adopting a broader definition of urbanization, we can say that while the urbanized population in England and Wales represented 72% of the total in 1891, for other countries the figure was 37% in France, 41% in Prussia and 28% in the United States.

The United Nations projected that half of the world’s population would live in urban areas at the end of 2008. It is predicted that by 2050 about 64% of the developing world and 86% of the developed world will be urbanized.

Like rural settlement, urban settlements have also been developed during the ancient period itself.

Based on Time, Location, and Function, Urban Settlement is categorized as −

• Ancient City
• Medieval City
• Modern City
• Administrative City/Town
• Industrial City
• Transport City
• Commercial City
• Mining City
• Cantonment City
• Educational City
• Religious City
• Tourists’ City
• Varanasi, Prayag (Allahabad), Pataliputra (Patna), Madurai, etc. are the examples of ancient city.
• Delhi, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Agra, Nagpur, etc. are the examples of medieval city.
• Surat, Daman, Panaji, Pondicherry, etc. are the examples of modern city.
• Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar, Gandhinagar, Dispur, etc. are the cities developed after the independence of India.
• Ghaziabad, Rohtak, Gurgaon, etc. are the satellite towns that have been developed around Delhi.
• The town or cities performing administrative works are categorized as administrative towns/cities. For example, the national capital (New Delhi) and the capital of all states and Union Territories are the administrative towns/cities.
• The towns/cities that developed because of the industrial development are known as industrial towns/cities. For example, Mumbai, Salem, Coimbatore, Modinagar, Jamshedpur, Hugli, Bhilai, etc.
• The towns/cities primarily engaged in export and import activities are known as transport towns/cities. For example, Kandla, Kochchi, Kozhikode, Vishakhapatnam, etc.
• The towns/cities primarily engaged in trade and business are known as commercial towns. For example, Kolkata, Saharanpur, Satna, etc.
• The towns that developed because of the mining activities are known as mining towns. For example, Raniganj, Jharia, Digboi, Ankaleshwar, Singrauli, etc.
• The towns that developed as garrison towns are known as Garrison Cantonment towns. For example, Ambala, Jalandhar, Mhow, Babina, Udhampur, etc.
• The towns that developed because of the development of educational institutions are known as educational towns. For example, Roorkee, Varanasi, Aligarh, Pilani, Allahabad etc.
• Some towns mark their development with the existence of religious shrines. Such towns are known as religious towns. For example, Varanasi, Mathura, Amritsar, Madurai, Puri, Ajmer, Pushkar, Tirupati, Kurukshetra, Haridwar, Ujjain, etc.
• The towns that developed because of the influx of tourists are known as tourists’ towns. For example, Nainital, Mussoorie, Shimla, Pachmarhi, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Udagamandalam (Ooty), Mount Abu, etc.

Types of Urban Settlements based on size

Depending on the size urban centres are designated as town, city, million city, conurbation, megalopolis.

1. Town

The concept of ‘town’ can best be understood with reference to ‘village’. Population size is not the only criterion. Functional contrasts between towns and villages may not always be clearcut, but specific functions such as, manufacturing, retail and wholesale trade, and professional services exist in towns

2. City

A city may be regarded as a leading town, which has outstripped its local or regional rivals. In the words of Lewis Mumford, “ the city is in fact the physical form of the highest and most complex type of associative life”. Cities are much larger than towns and have a greater number of economic functions. They tend to have transport terminals, major financial institutions and regional administrative offices. When the population crosses the one million mark it is designated as a million city

3. Conurbation

The term conurbation was coined by Patrick Geddes in 1915 and applied to a large area of urban development that resulted from the merging of originally separate towns or cities. Greater London, Manchester, Chicago and Tokyo are examples. The National Capital Region (NCR) is a name for the conurbation or metropolitan area which encompasses the entire National Capital Territory of Delhi as well as Gurgaon, Faridabad, Noida and Ghaziabad, which are urban areas ringing it in the neighbouring states of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan.

4. Megalopolis

This Greek word meaning “great city”, was popularised by Jean Gottman (1957) and signifies ‘super- metropolitan’ region extending, as union of conurbations. The urban landscape stretching from Boston in the north to south of Washington in U.S.A. is the best known example of a megalopolis.

5. Million City

The number of million cities in the world has been increasing as never before. London reached the million mark in 1800, followed by Paris in 1850, New York in 1860, and by 1950 there were around 80 such cities. The rate of increase in the number of million cities has been three-fold in every three decades – around 160 in 1975 to around 438 in 2005.

India has a total of 39 cities that each have populations exceeding one million residents. Of these cities, two have populations that exceed 10 million — Mumbai and Delhi. While these megacities contribute millions to the population, the country also has smaller but still very populated cities, including 388 that have populations exceeding 100,000, and a whopping 2,483 cities with populations of over 10,000. When looking at these numbers, it isn’t hard to see why India is the second most populous country, falling only to China.

List of metropolitan areas in India

India’s Urban Challenges

Urbanization is an integral part of the process of economic growth. As in most countries, India’s towns and cities make a major contribution to the country’s economy. With less than 1/3 of India’s people, its urban areas generate over 2/3 of the country’s GDP and account for 90% of government revenues.

Urbanization in India has expanded rapidly as increasing numbers of people migrate to towns and cities in search of economic opportunity. Slums now account for 1/4 of all urban housing. In Mumbai, for instance, more than half the population lives in slums, many of which are situated near employment centers in the heart of town, unlike in most other developing countries.

Meeting the needs of India’s soaring urban populations is and will therefore continue to be a strategic policy matter. Critical issues that need to be addressed are:

• Poor local governance
• Weak finances
• Inappropriate planning that leads to high costs of housing and office space; in some Indian cities these costs are among the highest in the world
• Critical infrastructure shortages and major service deficiencies that include erratic water and power supply, and woefully inadequate transportation systems
• Rapidly deteriorating environment

.

View larger map

World Cultures

Introduction
Components of Culture
Processes of cultural change
World Cultural Regions Languages

Introduction

Culture is an all-encompassing term that defines the tangible lifestyle of a people and their prevailing values and beliefs. The concept of culture is closely identified with anthropology. Over more than a century ago most anthropologists believed that culture was learned. However, recent advances in sociobiology and related fields suggest that certain behaviors may be genetically determined, so that culture has an “instinctive” component as well as a “learned” one.

Culture and Human Geography

The concept of culture lies at the heart of human geography. Locational decisions, patterns, and landscapes are fundamentally influenced by cultural attitudes and practices. The concept of culture, like the regional concept discussed in the previous chapter, appears to be deceptively simple, but in fact is complex and challenging. The definitions of culture vary widely, as does our use of the word itself, but all refer in one way or another to humans—their development, ideas, and adaptation to the world in which they live.

Components

Culture is made up of four major components.

• The first of these is a cultural trait a single attribute of a culture such as eating with certain utensils.
• The second component is a cultural complex a discrete combination of traits exhibited by a particular culture such as keeping cattle for different purposes.
• The third component is a culture system culture complexes with traits in common that can be grouped together such as ethnicity, language, religion, and other cultural elements.
• The final component, the cultural region the area within which a particular culture system prevails is marked by all the attributes of a culture.

Cultural regions may be expressed on a map, but many geographers prefer to describe these as geographic regions since their definition is based on a combination of cultural properties plus locational and environmental circumstances.

Human race

Human race refers to a group of people with certain features in common that distinguish them from other groups of people. There are various systems of classifications of human races. A 20th century classification given by American anthropologist Carleton S. Coon has divided the humans into five race:

• Caucasoid (White) race
• Negroid (Black) race
• Capoid (Bushmen/Hottentots) race
• Mongoloid (Oriental/ Amerindian) race
• Australoid (Australian Aborigine

We note here that technically, there are only three races viz. Caucasoid, mongoloid and negroid. Australoids as well as the Capoids (Hottentots and Bushmen) are considered to be sub-groups of Negroid people. In terms of population, the largest group is of Caucasoid (5596) followed by Mongoloid (33%), Negroid (8%) and Australoid (4%).

Caucasoid

Caucasoid includes people from Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Western Asia (the Middle East), parts of Central Asia and South Asia. The term Caucasian was initially a geographical term denoting the Caucasus region (Caucasia) of central Eurasia. However, later the word got many meanings including one of the races of humans.

The Caucasoids are further classified into various sub-races such as Aryans (including some Indo-Europeans), Semitic (Arabs and Israelis) Hamitic (Berber-Cushitic-Egyptian races), Nordic, Mediterranean, Dinaric, Alpine, Arabid, East Baltic, Turanid, Iranid, Armenoid and so on. Each of these sub-races is based on some geographic location.

Key Features Caucasian people

The people of Caucasian and its sub-races have white skin color ranging from white to dark wheatish.

They posses all kinds of hair including straight, blonde, wavy etc.

. They have prominent eyes, pronounced and well-shaped nose and sharp features, medium built and average to stocky musculature.

The Caucasian people have sparse skin pigmentation and due to this reason, they are not suited to live in hot equatorial climates.

The Negroid

The Negroid are represented by the African people. They are also called woollen haired people. There are several sub-races of Negroids also including Aborigines, Melanesians, Negritos, Papuans, Dravidians etc. They also include a number of tribes such as Niotic, Bantu, Sudanic, Pygmy, Khosian etc.

Salient Features

Most striking feature of Negroids dark skin due to dense pigmentation, coarse black and wavy hair.

They have wide noses and foreheads, broad, often thick lips, large built and broad skeletal structure.

These people have stamina and ability to survive in very adverse environmental conditions including sever heat. The dense pigmentation adapts them to strong heat and sun of equatorial regions in which this race originated.

Hottentots and Bushmen of the Kalahari. Hottentots and Bushmen are two major groups of Negroid people.

Mongoloid

Chinese and Japanese key representatives of the Mongoloid people. They are also called straight haired people. The Amerinds (Native American Indians) are supposed to be an early offshoot while the Polynesians are a subgroup of the Mongoloids with a great deal of racial intermixture.

Thus Mongoloid group has vast and diverse geographical distribution and so “Asian” seems to be more suitable term for them. The sub-races of Mongoloids include East Asian, North Asian and Native American.

Salient Features

• The striking feature of Mongoloids is yellowish or light wheatish skin, extremely straight and black hair, very less hair growth upon their bodies, small, almond-shaped eyes, slight built, very lean musculature and small but clear facial features.

Mongoloids can also be divided into Neo-Mongoloids and Paleo-Mongoloids also. Neo Mongoloids include ethnic groups such as Eskimos, Buryats. Chinese, Chukchis etc. They have extremely mongoloid features. The Paleo-Mongoloids include ethnic groups such as Polynesians, Filipinos, Burmese, some Native American people etc.

Australoid

The Aborigines, Melanesians, Papuans, and Negritos i.e. original natives of the Australia sub-continent come under the Australoid race.

World Cultural Regions

The major cultural realms are:

1. Occidental Realm

2. Islamic Realm

3. Indian Realm

4. East Indian Realm

And the minor cultural realms are:

1. South-East Asian Realm

2. Meso-African or Negro African Realm

Occidental Realm:

Occidental culture is the culture of the European society. It is influenced to a great extent by Christianity. It has regional modifications on the basis of varying levels of industrialisation, political and economic thought, colonisation, commercialisation, urbanisation, and development of transport system, land development of social, political and economic institutions.

In many parts of the occidental culture, the impact of non-religious factors, particularly the effect of modernisation, is so great that the religious values are sidelined. Post- industrial Europe is fast emerging as a society where traditional values are nearly abandoned. The occidental culture covers a vast area. It is further divided into six sub-regions considering the impact of regional environment.

(i) West European is the most industrialised and urbanised culture.

(ii) Continental European culture is influenced by different political and economic thoughts, while Christianity remains an important influence.

(iii) Mediterranean Europe includes countries lying to the south of the Alps. It is the region of dominance of Christianity. To many geographers, the deep-rooted traditional social system is the principal cause of limited economic development in countries like Spain, Portugal and southern Italy, compared to countries of northern and western Europe which adopted necessary changes in their social systems.

(iv) Anglo-American and

(v) Australian cultural realms are practically the offspring’s of west European culture. Both are inhabited by migrants from west Europe. There are only some regional differences.

(vi) Latin American culture is very similar to the Mediterranean culture. It is the only region of occidental culture which lies in the tropics and is underdeveloped. It became a part of the occidental culture as a result of conversion of tribes into Christianity. The colonial languages, Spanish and Portuguese, have become the state languages. Regional architecture has been influenced by the Spanish and Portuguese styles. Practically all countries maintain economic, cultural and social ties with the Mediterranean countries.

Islamic Cultural Realm:

The culture here is influenced by Islamic values. It covers a vast geographical area from Morocco in the west to Pakistan in the east. The population is sparsely distributed due to inhospitable environment. The coasts, river basins and oases have been the cradles of Arabian culture in this realm. The British call it the Middle-East while the Germans call it a region of oriental culture. This cultural realm lies between the traditional Indian culture in the east and the modernised European culture in the west.

Islamic culture is highly orthodox and based on traditional beliefs, the impact of which can be seen in high female illiteracy rates. These countries have very high per capita incomes, but the level of modernisation is very low.

Indie Cultural Realm:

This is the culture of the Indian sub-continent. Baker called it a sub­-continental culture, while D. Stamp used the term paddy culture. This cultural realm is well-defined; it lies between Himalayas in the north, Indian Ocean in the south and Hindukush Mountains in the west.

This cultural realm is characterized by joint family, village community, caste system, semi- feudal land relations, subsistence agriculture, paddy farming, seasonal climate changes and agricultural season coming at the same time all over the region. The culture of this region is greatly influenced by Vedic values. Though the region is inhabited by various communities, the social system has the hidden impact of Vedic cultural values.

East Asian Culture:

This culture is basically a Buddhist culture with regional modifications. True Buddhist culture can be seen in South Korea and Japan. Even these two countries have felt the impact of industrialisation, urbanisation and modernisation. The culture of mainland China has modified the Buddhist system. This culture was adopted after the Second World War.

South-East Asian Culture It is a transitional culture lying at a place where different cultures have intermingled. Dominance of Buddhism can be seen in Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. Influence of Christianity can be seen in the Philippines and of Indie culture over islands of Indonesia. The Islamic influence is evident in Malaysia and the Indonesian islands. No other region has such peculiarities.

Meso-African Culture:

This culture is also known as the Negro culture. It principally includes tropical Africa. Similar cultural systems can be seen among the American Red Indians, Latin American tribes, Australian aboriginals and several tribes of Asia-Pacific region.

Historian Toynbee has used the term ‘marginalised culture’ for these traditional culture units. Some geographers even include Eskimos under this cultural realm. Thus, it is a widely scattered cultural realm characterised by marginalised and relatively isolated communities.

Racial Groups of India

The present population of the Indian subcontinent has been divided broadly into the following racial groups:

1. The Negritos

Perhaps they were the first of the racial groups that came to India. They got settled in the hilly areas of Kerala and the Andaman Islands. Kadar, Irula and Puliyan tribes of Kerala resemble to a great extent with the Negritos. They are related to Africa, Australia and their neighbouring islands. The Negritos have black (dark) skin, woolly hair, broad and flat nose and slightly protruded jaws.

2. The Proto-Australoids

Perhaps the people belonging to the Proto-Australoid race came here just after the Negritos.

Their sources are Australian aborigines.

They are settled in the central India from the Rajmahal hills to the Aravalis. Santhal, Bhil, Gond, Munda, Oraon etc. tribes are related to this group.

They are physically different from the Negritos in many ways, e.g. their hair is coarse and straight instead of being woolly.

It is considered that they were the people who, in collaboration with the Mediterranean race, had developed the Indus Valley Civilization.

Their skeletons have been found in the excavations of Mohenjodaro and Harappa.

3. The Mongoloids

The original homeland of this race was Mongolia (China). The Mongoloids came to India through the passes of northern and eastern mountain ranges. These people are concentrated in the nearby areas of the Himalayas, e.g. Ladakh, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and other areas of the north-eastern India. The Mongoloids have pale or light pale skin, short height, comparatively large head, half open eyes, flat face and broad nose. In India, they can be divided into two branches-

A. Paleo-Mongoloids- They were the first of the Mongoloids who came to India. These people are settled mainly in the border areas of the Himalayas. They are found mostly in Assam and the adjacent states.

B. Tibeto-Mongoloids- These people came from Tibet and are settled mainly in Bhutan, Sikkim, areas of north-western Himalayas and beyond the Himalayas in which Ladakh and Baltistan are included.

12.(d)Mongloids are inhabitants of northern, eastern and south-east Asia. Their eyes has a characteristic fold of skin on the upper lid, hair is lank and straight and the height is medium. The group also includes the Chinese, Japanese, Burmese, Thais, Vietnamese and Malays.
Ans. 12.(d)Mongloids are inhabitants of northern, eastern and south-east Asia. Their eyes has a characteristic fold of skin on the upper lid, hair is lank and straight and the height is medium. The group also includes the Chinese, Japanese, Burmese, Thais, Vietnamese and Malays.

4. The Mediterraneans

They came to India from the south-west Asia. They may be divided into three groups-

A. Paleo-Mediterraneans- They were the first of the Mediterranean’s race that came to India. They were of medium height, black skin, well- built body and long head. Perhaps they were the people who had begun cultivation for the first time in the north-west India. The group which came later pushed them towards the central and the south India. At present, the Paleo-Mediterraneans with their other sub-groups comprise the most part of the population of the south India and a large part of the population of the north India.

B. Mediterranean’s- They came to India later on. They developed the Indus valley civilization in collaboration with the Proto-Australoids and initiated the bronze culture for the first time during 2500-1500 BC. Later on, the new invading group coming from north-west pushed them from the Indus valley to the Ganga valley and towards the south of the Vindhyas. Today, most of the population of lower castes in the north India belongs to this race.

C. Oriental-Mediterranean’s- They came to India very late. They are populated mostly in the north-western border areas of Pakistan and Punjab. They are also found in sufficient number in Sindh (Pakistan), Rajasthan and western Uttar Pradesh.

5. The Brachycephalics :

Apart from Mongoloid, some other races found in India having broad head are:

• Alpinoids

• Dinarics

• Armenoids

6. The Nordics:

They are the last of the racial groups that came to India. They came from Taiga and Baltic regions. They were Aryan speaking families with long head, fair complexion, and sharp nose, well-developed and well-built body. They are found in the region of Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Jammu.

Languages in the World

Language is a system that consists of the development, acquisition, maintenance and use of complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so; and a language is any specific example of such a system.

Top languages by population per National encyklopedin

Languages with at least 10 million first-language speakers

Tribes of the world

Pygmy

There are many different ‘Pygmy’ peoples – for example, the Bambuti, the Batwa, the Bayaka and the Bagyeli (‘Ba -‘ means ‘people’) – who live scattered over a huge area in central and western Africa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Congo (Brazzaville), Cameroon, Gabon, Central African Republic, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda. In many places they are recognised as being the first inhabitants of the region.

The best Known pygmy groups are those who live in tropical Africa. They are classified into the eastern, central and western groups. The eastern pygmies-the Mabuti live in the Ituri forest of Zaire, the central pygmies are scattered in the Congo republic and the western pygmies such as Bongo are found in Gabon.

Pygmies stature varies from 1-33 meters (52 inches) to 1.49 metres (58 inches) averaging 1.46 metres (57 inches), for male and 1.38 metres (54 inches) to females. The skin colour ranges from yellowish or reddish brown to very dark brown, having prognathic jaws, broad flat nose, large eyes and dark woolly hair. Culturally as well as racially they differ from Negro.

They are food gatherer and hunter and live in small groups in the dense forest of Congo basin. They live in areas of isolation and relative isolation and more about continually. They hunt with bows and poisoned arrows, their food supplies often derived mainly from trees, plants, nuts, birds, insects, depend mainly on vegetable food hunting and occasional fishing.

Due to warm humid and damp climate, they live without clothes, many of them in complete nakedness. The wearing cloth is a covering of bark strip or vegetable fibres which is more or less wide and run more or less around the hips.

BORO

The life style, economy, society, religion, beliefs and the cultural ethos of food gathering and pastoral communities of Amazon Basin and other Latin American regions are also largely controlled by the climate and natural vegetation.

The Boro is a sub-group of Red Indians of the Western Amazon forests. Due to high temperature and moisture throughout the year. It is covered with vast equatorial forests. Due to this harsh environment the Boro occupy small clearings in forests, made by laboriously burning down the trees in same relatively open tract.

They have no domestic animals. Their main dependence is on agriculture (root crops, tubers, cassava, coca, tobacco). These people acquire a remarkable tolerance for the drug, which enables them, when taken in large quantities to go for several days. With out sleep, food or drink. Boro eat certain earth’s (scraped from the hearth.) to make deficiency, clothes are made of bark and paint their bodies and the lips and wear, wood ear lobes Boro are not organised and unite.

The Semang

The Semang are a Negrito ethnic group of the Malay Peninsula. They are found in Perak, Pahang, Kelantan and Kedah of Malaysia.

They have been recorded to have lived here since before the 3rd century. They are ethnologically described as nomadic hunter-gatherers.

They migrate continuously, save for short natural harvests and rarely stay more than three or four days at one place. Their indMdual groups are small, a band of twenty to thirty persons including children is considered large.

The over dependence of Semang on vegetable, food, hunting and fishing is owed in the environmental compulsions. They have to gather wide varieties of berries, nuts, pith, leaves, shoots, and especially roots tubers and wild yams.

In hot and equatorial climatic little may be stored or preserved. Their clothes are made of vegetation and surrounding forests, especially of leaves and barks.

SAKAIS

They are living in the lower attitudes and valleys in Malaya, having dense forest. They are long stature, white in colour and lean and thin, with elongated their head having black curly hair. Sakais use vegetation (grass) to cover their body.

They depend upon primitive agriculture and grow maize, rice, pumpkin, melon. Beside agriculture fishing and fruit. Cultivation is their main occupation.

There are various theory pertaining to the origin of Sakai people, one of the theories include that they are the descendant of the Proto-Malay and Negrito tribes that had been pushed inland due to the arrival of the Malay people to Sumatra. While some of them claimed that they are Minangkabau origin who migrated to the edge of Gasib River, upstream of Rokan River, Riau hinterland in the 14th century.

Most of the Sakai community living today involved in the agricultural sector. There are no definite data about the number of Sakai. Population data issued by the Ministry of Social Affairs Republic of Indonesia stated that the number of Sakai in Bengkalis Regency of 4,995 inhabitants.

PAPUAN

The Aboriginies of New-guinea Island in Pacific ocean are called Papuan. They have resemblance with pygmies. They are short stature, with dark brown skin colour, ugly looking. Their clothes are made of thin animal skin which they wear from waist till knee. The Papuan widens remove their hairs and use mud at the head. They hang the skull of their dead husband covered with a net (Jail).

The main economy of Papuan is agriculture. They grow sugarcane and pappya. Some Papuan are pastoral pig is their pet animaL They gather their food from forest, sometimes hunting is also practiced. They have law circular houses, their roofs are covered with grass. Their houses are covered with met.

Papuan are rough, dry hearted and superstitions. They believes in dead soul.

Bushmen

Bushmen are members of various Khoesān-speaking indigenous hunter-gatherer groups that are the first nations of Southern Africa, and whose territories span Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and South Africa.

Bushmen are also known as San. There are about 62 thousand Bushmen in Kalahari desert of Africa. Traditionally they live and move in groups of twenty or less, encamping for only a few weeks at one place and hunting and gathering over an area of upto 600 sq. km around the camp.

Today Bushmen are mainly confined in the barren inhospitable environment of the desert of Kalahari (Namibia, Botswana, Angola) and adjacent sub tropical grasslands of S. West Africa, Formerly Bushmen group have extended for north and eastwards into Basutoland, Natal and Zimbabwe. They have resemblance to the Negritoes.

Bushmen live in a great plateau, about 2000 metre above the sea level. With massive ranges in the east; having sub-tropical climate. They abundance rainfall has resulted into dense forests on the eastern margin, while the stony desert in the west. It is a land of ephemeral streams with permanent water only in depressions of the stream beds.

The women collect roots, berries, grubs, insects, tortoises, frogs and lizards. Water is collected and brought into the camp in ostrich egg. Shells or deried bucks stomachs. Men almost daily go for hunt. Each hunts or gathers for his own immediate family.

The clothing of Bushmen is scanty, men wear a triangle loin cloth whose, point is drawn backward between the legs while women wear squarish front apron, hanging from a waist belt, while old women same time wear an apron at back as well and suspended it from shoulder. But the most important item of a female dress is the cloak locally known as Kross.

Bedouin

The Bedouin or Bedu are a grouping of nomadic Arab people who have historically inhabited the desert regions in North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and the Levant.

Livestock and herding, principally of goats, sheep and dromedary camels comprised the traditional livelihoods of Bedouins. These were used for meat, dairy products, and wool. Most of the staple foods that made up the Bedouins’ diet were dairy products.

Bedouins are the mixture of South-west Asia and Mediterranean races and resemble with very much to the Egyptian and Syrian peasants. They are five feet and four inches in height and lightly built. They have a long, narrow face with prominent nose, dark eyes and hair with pale complexion.

Masai

The Maasai are a Nilotic ethnic group inhabiting northern, central and southern Kenya and northern Tanzania. They are among the best known local populations internationally due to their residence near the many game parks of the African Great Lakes, and their distinctive customs and dress.

Masai belong to the pastoral society, Masai are the mixture of the Mediterranean and Negroid peoples, known as the best and most typical cattle herders of East Africa. They occupy the equatorial plateau of Africa to the east of Lake Victoria, extending from North to South 800 km and east to west 550 km, including the part of Kenya, Northern Tanganyika and Eastern Uganda. They live in Swampy grasslands of the upper nile. Though they are dark in skin colour, clearly distinct from Negroid surrounded them on south and east.

Masai huts are 4 to 5 metres long and 4 metres wide, walled and roofed with layers of long grass well set with poles and ropes and plastered with mud or cow dung.

A number of these huts from about twenty to fifty, constitute one kraal, made of nearly closed circle of huts, projected by an outer ring of thick thorn fence with two entrances at the opposite sides for the cattle. The circular plan of Kraal is particularly suited for defence.

Masai religious leader is known as Taibon.

KHIRGHIZ

Khirghiz are the dwellers of Southern Tien-shan and the Pamirs, who are closely related to Kazaks in race, colour, language, speech, custom and the way of life. Russians often call Kazaks also as Khirghiz. Tien-shan is a vast series of elongated mountains.

Many perennial rivers descend from the snow copped peaks of about 6000 metres above the sea level. The summer rain helps in the development of luxurious pastures. In summer there are good grasses in the high altitude pastures while in winter low attitude provide good grazing grounds.

There are about one million Khirghiz who live mainly in the Republic of Khirghizia. They are strongly Mongoloid in appearance; short in stature, heavily built with yellow skin and coarse black hair. They are mixture of Mangols and Turkish tribes.

The winter camps of Khirghiz are often very large and the whole tribe is found concentrated at one spot. Near these camping sites are their fields which are cultivated by the people who stay behind in the summer season. In fields they grow barley. Millet and wheat. But in spring season they go for hunting. Moral deer is a precious hunt. Yak is their main animal.

The tent of Khirghiz is generally circular in shape with vertical walls and domed shaped roof. The wall frame consists of a collapsible trellis set up right in a circle and standing about four feet high, constructed of willow rods held together with teather thongs. The floor is covered with felting. The erection and dismanting of the tent is the work of women and poor dependents. Two or three camels are needed to carry a large tent when packed for migration.

Khirghiz are Muslims by faith. Their food, clothing and life style are considerably influenced by their faith. They barter horses and sheep for cereals, clothes and utensils. They also purchases flour, sugar, barley, tea and coffee.

THE ESKIMOS

Eskimos are the indigenous circumpolar peoples who have traditionally inhabited the northern circumpolar region from eastern Siberia (Russia) to Alaska (of the United States), Canada, and Greenland.

The Eskimos are generally confined in the Arctic Tundra region, which extends over the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, Northern Canada, Victoria, Melville, Baffin islands, Greenland, Northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russian Arctic islands (Novaya, Zomlaya, Severny a Zemlya etc.) and the Northern and eastern part of Siberia upto the Bering strait.

The dominant ethnic groups who oscillate in the Tundra region are Eskimos in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Eastern Russia, Meut in Aleutian islands and Alaska, Yuti, Chukchi, Yukaghir and Yakuts in Siberia Saami in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.

They are short statured people, flat but narrow face, small snub noses, yellow brown skin colour and coarse, straight black hair.

In Tundra region the elements of weather and factors of climate impose special conditions on the life of men, animals and Plants.

In Tundra region, especially in the Arctic zone, the long northern winter of shrunken days and prolonged darkness is followed by a brief summer by which the ice floes melt and open water flanks the shore, causes hardy northern trees, stone pine, larch, birch grasses, mosses lichens and low berry bearing bushes.

Eskimos wear reindeer and other furs clothes. A sack like coat of reindeer hide reaching to the knees, with long sleeves and tail is a main garments, during the colder spells two or more than two hide fur coats are warm one above the other. A Long front apron of hide also hangs down from the neck, the lower part is usually decorated with elaborate trimmings of various colours, fur and hair.

The traveling of Eskimos is sledge, drawn by dog team (5 to 6) built of whale-bone or of wood, which is normally five metre in length.

SAMOYEDS

The northern part of the Tundra region In western Siberia, In between ob and Pichora basin Is the home of Samoyeds, beLong to Mongoloid. They are short statured, having yellow to light brown colour, with small, snub nose with flat and narrow face; their’s hairs and straight and black. Samoyeds wear reindeer’s hide and fur clothes.

They wear sack like coat of reindeer hide reaching to the knee. With tong sleeves and tail in a main garments. A long front apron of hide also hangdown from the neck.

The main occupation of Samoyed is hunting and pastoralism. Fish is the main economic activity of hunting, they hunt wild animals and eat their meat. Beside this they eat macro as well as micro consumer.

They are migratory hunters, do not have permanent house, live in tents made of reindeer hide. They burn flesh inside the tent inorder to keep it warm. They are socialLy as well as cuLturally backward.

YUKAGHIR

They are the resident of the land in between Varkhoyanask and Stanovay mountain in North-East Siberia.

They also belong to Mongoloid race, having yeLlow and brown colour, short statured, with smaLl snub nose, flat and narrow face, with black and straight hairs. Like Eskimos they wear sack Like coat of reindeer hide, reaching to the knee, with long sleeves and tail In a main garments. A long front apron of hide also hangs down from the neck.

Hunting and fishing is the main occupation of Yukaghir. They hunt wild reindeer. Fishing is done from small

lakes and rivers. Their food is based on meat and fish. Beside this.

MAORI

The PoLynesians aborigines of NewzeLand are known as Maori. Normally they were hunters. Now they are

agriculturalists and food gatherer from forests. They are stone as well as wooden carvers.

AFRIDI

Pakthuni aboriginies, live In between Safdeh-koh to Peshawar. They are courageous and warriors. In sixteen and seventeen century, Ahmad Shah Durrani, the ruler of Afghanistan, got them employed in his army for battle against the Mughal emperors.

ZULU

They are the resident of Netal republic, speak Nugi language. They have resemblance in religious and cultural with those of Bantoo. They are agriculturalist as well as pastoral. Now-a-days some of Zulu work in English farms.

KOSSACKS

They are the native of northern part of Caspian and Black sea. These people have their own views. The Russian government had given them assurance of preference for admission in their army. They are the agriculturalists of Poland and Lithuania. They are brave and warriors.

3.The original home of the gypsies was :[1995] (a)Egypt (b)Russia (c)India (d)Persia
Ans. 3.(c)The ‘Gypsies’ are a group of people found in Central Asia. But, the original home of Gypsies was in India (Western Rajasthan and Punjab) area. ‘Gypsies’ are an ethnic group, which for unknown reasons took to a wandering life style during the late middle ages.
23.A person of mixed European and Indian blood in Latin America is called a :[1999] (a)Mulatto (b)Mestizo (c)Meiji (d)Mau Mau
Ans. 23.(b)Mestizo originally meant a person of combined European and American Indian descent, regardless of where the person was born.
38.Consider the following statements:[2003] 1.In Macedonia, ethnic Albanians are in a minority 2.In Kosovo, Serbians are in a majority Which of these statements is/are correct? (a)Only 1 (b)Only 2 (c)Both 1 and 2 (d)Neither 1 nor 2
Ans. 38.(a)In Macedonia, ethinic Albanian population is 23%, which is a good number in Macedonia. But in Kosovo 92% are Albanians and Serbians are in a minority.
.

View larger map