Impact of Urbanization and Economic Growth on Environmental Quality in Metropolitan Cities in India

With increasing urbanization, accompanied by the growing population, the number of vehicles in metropolitan cities has negatively impacted the environment and climate across all metropolitan cities in India. This excessive urbanization has overloaded the limited, scarce resources, and deteriorated the environmental quality, affecting natural resources and the environment. This chapter overviews the trend of urbanization captured by increasing population, vehicular growth, and growth rate of value added in agriculture and industry. The impact of urbanization has been measured on the various parameters of environmental quality, such as water and air quality, temperature, rainfall, and humidity in four metropolitan cities of India, namely Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, and Mumbai, for the period 1991 to 2021. These factors are also used to capture the climate change. Variations in temperature and precipitation from 1991 to 2021 for the four metropolitan cities in India have been analyzed. Correlations between the urbanization and climate change variables measured as temperatures signify that the population holds a robust significant correlation with temperature variation in all three metropolitan cities, ruling out Delhi. The correlation between urbanization, economic growth, and water and air quality is significant in Delhi and Mumbai, moderate in Kolkata, but harmful in Chennai. The paper suggests strategic planning of urban planning so that the impact of urbanization on environmental quality is minimized.