India's Small Cities Transforming Rapidly

"In Kolhapur, and in small cities like it across this country, India's economic expansion and its opening to the world are converging in an urbanization of values: the supplanting of small-city contentment with metropolitan ambitions and anxieties...

The experience of small cities could prove prophetic. In this mostly agrarian nation, they remain conduits of change between big city and countryside, linked to metropolises by an itinerant elite and to rural villages by farmers who keep homes in town."