Lately, marketing gurus and policy planners have made common cause of celebrating the rural market in India. While urban India and the world took a hit from the global economic slowdown, India’s rural economy offered the rainbow of resilience. FMCG majors, telecom giants, auto players—the list of sectors that have had cause to revel in this rainbow is long. But our columnists have been drawing attention to how the binary simplicity of a rural-urban formula is fast becoming inadequate to describe a fast-evolving scene where rising incomes and infrastructural investments are imbuing suburbs and satellite towns with new energies. Following alongside such analysis, FE reported yesterday that peri-urban areas is where it is all happening. This sizeable and (also) resilient market lies between India’s urban hubs and rural centres. It has been variously clubbed under umbrella terms such as tier I, II, III or IV centres or small towns, depending on the marketers’ diverse industry criteria. A new study by Indicus Analytics that looks to overcome this confusion by classifying peri-urban markets based on population size finds that they are the ones that really helped India’s consumer product companies and automakers to report gains at a time when most corporates feared the effects of the global financial crisis had on their bottom lines. From Dasna, which is a short 40 km off Ghaziabad, to Hodal in Haryana’s Faridabad district and Niwari, which is located off the Hapur road in Ghaziabad, to take some examples that are really close to the capital and its expansion, we have instances of how traffic between urban and non-urban centres is throwing up startlingly new amalgamations.

In Niwari, FE reports that the local panchayat has dug into its pockets to set up solar street lights. Across Dasna, Hodal and Niwari, we know that educational institutes are proliferating. Whatever be their quality, they offer definitive evidence of a desire for higher education amongst the locals in this twilight zone. This evidence, in turn, is indicative of shifts in labour profiles as well as reflective of how infrastructural developments like roads and telecom have been transforming labour aspirations. All the energies evidenced in these buffer zones between rural and urban centres also affirm that more efficient delivery of markets, communication infrastructure, electricity et al indeed translate into more potent growth delivery. But both marketing gurus and policymakers have to recognise the significance of the rural-urban continuum before they can reap its advantages.

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