The missing middle between the big and the small: Urban primacy in the Indian State of Karnataka

Urban primacy in the Indian state of Karnataka is severe, since Bengaluru, the state's capital city, is more than eight times the size of the second biggest city. Our objectives in this paper are to investigate this primacy, estimating Zipf's law, understanding transport networks and inadequacies in municipal infrastructure, and adopting a non-conventional technique, i.e., that of surveying private firms, to understand how to alleviate the same. Estimating Zipf's law, we find that Karnataka's primacy worsened during 2011-19. Using GIS maps, we find several road connectivity issues around smaller cities in the state of Karnataka. We find several gaps in municipal infrastructure such as roads, parks and storm water drains in the smaller cities. Based on a survey of 81 firms across selected 12 cities in the state (including Bengaluru), we find that their operation and maintenance costs are higher than investment costs, due to weak municipal infrastructure. The qualitative views of firms in the smaller towns regarding their disadvantages conformed to the objective evidence on their costs. This has implications for better policies for balanced regional development not only in Indian states, but also other geographies characterized by primacy. These are that transport networks be extensive, and municipal infrastructure be robust to encourage firm and resident location decisions, for distribution of economic activity equally across the urban hierarchy. • We use secondary and primary data for investigating urban primacy. • We use GIS to map transport networks. • We undertake primary surveys of firms in 11 cities. • We find that firm logistic costs are higher than investment costs. • Poor municipal infrastructure needs to be fixed in smaller cities.