14. Classifying the Million-Plus Urban Agglomerations of India—Geographical Types and Quality of Life

India is one the fastest growing and developing economies and also societies of the world. An evident consequence of this is urbanisation, which poses a huge challenge for the population and the political decision-makers of the country and is also one of the most topical research trends of the social geographical researches concerning India. The paper first introduces the general urbanisation trends experienced in the sovereign India in the 1951–2011 period, in the framework of an analysis of statistical data recorded in censuses, indicating the volume and trends of urbanisation. This is followed by the demonstration of the structural features and diverse development paths of the million-plus agglomerations (i.e. agglomerations with at least a million inhabitants), connected to one of its main characteristics depicted by this introductory summary: metropolisation. Using the quantitative categories defined during their analysis, the authors classify the metropolises of India in urbanisation types, with the method of cluster analysis. In what follows, we sought to answer whether any correlation could be justified between these urbanization types and the complex quality of life indicators we generated for the central settlements of the agglomerations.