What Is The Cost Of Living In Your City?

We often complain about the cost of living in Indian cities. Be it the capacity to afford a home or take it on rent, the restaurants we flock to or the conveniences we yearn for, everything comes at a cost. However, even within our Indian cities, there are notable differences in the way we spend on a living. Numbeo, is a crowd-sourced database, offers great insight into this.

Cities at a glance

If you want to save up on your costs, you should be living in Trivandrum where, data suggest, the cost of living is least when compared to 26 other Indian cities. At 20.53 per cent, Trivandrum's cost of living is the least but when it comes to the rent index. Vadodara steals the show, with 3.86 per cent only.

Among the southern cities, besides Trivandrum, Coimbatore, Mangalore, Visakhapatnam, Kochi, Mysore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bengaluru are amongst the affordable cities to live in, Bengaluru being the costliest.

Gurgaon, with an index of 34.60 per cent, is the costliest Indian city to live, closely followed by Mumbai, Delhi and Noida. In terms of rent, there seems to be no tougher competition to Mumbai at 22.42 per cent which is followed by Gurgaon at 10.47 per cent, Bengaluru at 9.53 per cent and Delhi at 9.52 per cent.

When it comes to the purchasing power of people, Gurgaon again takes the pie with 89.77 per cent while Pune is close second at 88.09 per cent. The purchasing power depends on the average wages in the city and it is the least in Kolkata at 45.21 per cent followed by Coimbatore. (Refer to chart)

Source: Numbeo

Lifestyle

The way you live and carry yourself is a product of your environment, too. For example, if you were to speak of the pollution levels around you, Ghaziabad, Faridabad, Kanpur, Delhi, Allahabad, Gurgaon, Varanasi, Noida, Meerut and Amritsar are the 10 most polluted cities in the country.

If you talk about how expensive your trip to a restaurant is, Gurgaon, Delhi, Mumbai, Noida and Kolkata are the top five in this list. Why go far? Talk about the cost of these groceries and Mumbai, Gurgaon, Delhi, Ahmedabad and Chennai are the most expensive ones.

In terms of healthcare, Mangalore, Gurgaon, Chennai, Hyderabad, Coimbatore, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Pune, Delhi and Visakhapatnam, in this order are the costliest but also the best in their specialty areas.

In terms of quality of life, which is based on various parameters such as purchasing power, safety, healthcare, price to income ratio, traffic commute, climate, etc, overall, Mangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Coimbatore and Bengaluru score the brownie points.

Note

All prices are in comparison to the costs in New York City. All values for New York City is taken to be 100, and this is the basis of comparison. If the rent index is 120 per cent, it means rents are 20 per higher than in New York City. If a city has rent index of 70, that means on an average city rents are 30 per cent less expensive than in New York City.

The parameters on which these cities have been ranked include:

• Cost of Living Index measures relative cost of living over time or regions. It is an index that measures differences in the price of goods and services, and allows for substitutions with other items as prices vary.
• Rent Index is a measure of the level of rents for dwellings in a geographic area over time. Like house price indices, rates are more accurate when they are quality-adjusted and encompass large, representative samples.
• Cost of Living Plus Rent Index is an estimation of consumer goods prices, including rent in the city comparing to New York City.
• Local Purchasing Power shows relative purchasing power in buying goods and services in a given city for the average wage in that city.