The population of Kolkata urban agglomeration grew from 1,510,000 in 1901 to 4,670,000 in 1951 to 9,194,000 in 1981. Kolkata did not draw in people from rural areas by offering a better quality of life. As in any other Indian city, the immigrants found poverty in Kolkata as severe and dehumanising as in the villages, but was offered a relatively quick opportunity of new income through placement in the urban economy. With the partition of India in 1947, the metropolitan cities of Kolkata and Delhi were flooded by displaced persons or refugees from Pakistan. The Union government at Delhi, with better resources at its command, handled the task of rehabilitation faster and more comprehensively, than the state government in Kolkata could accomplish. Left largely to themselves the refugees in Kolkata gradually secured their placements in the urban economy.
The 1951 census found that only 33.2 percent of Kolkata`s inhabitants were city-born, the rest were immigrants: 12.3 percent were from elsewhere in West Bengal, 26.6 percent from other Indian states, and 26.9 percent from East Pakistan. In 1981, the Government of West Bengal estimated the total number of persons displaced from East Bengal to the state to be around 8 million or one sixth of the total population of the state. Several million refugees settled in the outskirts of Kolkata.
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