The Hindu Business Line : NCAER-Future Capital book identifies ‘Twenty cities to watch’

The National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and Future Capital have identified 20 key cities to track as centres of economic development over the coming decades.

The 20 cities have been listed in the book “The next urban frontier: Twenty cities to watch”, which is a collaborative effort between the two organisations.

This book was launched by the NCAER President and Co-Chairman of Infosys Technologies Ltd, Mr Nandan Nilekani, here on Thursday.

Urbanisation

Speaking on the occasion, Mr Nilekani highlighted that India had for long been having the notion that urbanisation is bad.

“But now economic liberalisation has brought out very clearly that urbanisation was fundamental, necessary and part of the foundation of the economy.

“Urbanisation is important as it drives economic growth, income growth.

“It may be interesting to note that the most underdeveloped parts of India are least urbanised”, he said.

Broad buckets

These cities have been grouped into three broad buckets — megacities, which are the largest cities in terms of population and overall consumer markets; boomtowns, which stand out as the next set of big-population cities with high expenditure per household; and niche cities, which are smaller in terms of overall population but still hit well above their weight in spending per household.

Ms Roopa Purushothaman, Chief Economist, Future Group, who is the co-author of this book, said that these 20 cities together account for 10 per cent of India’s population, but generates 31 per cent of disposable income.

The megacities are Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Pune.

The boomtowns are Surat, Kanpur, Jaipur, Lucknow, Nagpur, Bhopal and Coimbatore.

The niche cities are Faridabad, Amritsar, Ludhiana, Chandigarh and Jalandhar.

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