Roopa Purushothaman and Rajesh Shukla, the celebrated co-authors of Goldman Sachs’ famous BRIC report, which in 2003 had predicted that by 2050 Brazil, Russia, India, and China put together will have larger economies in US$ terms than the G-6, consisting of the U.S., Germany, Japan, the U.K., France and Italy have collaborated again to come out with a joint study entitled “The Next Urban Frontier: Twenty Cities To Watch.” This time the study, though, has been prepared on behalf of their respective current employers, Kishore Biyani’s Future Capital Research and National Council of Applied Economic Research’s (NCAER).

The study has identified 20 top Indian cities, which though accounting for only 10% of the country’s population, generate as much as 60% of its surplus income and 31% of its disposable income.

The authors have classified these 20 large cities, which accounted for nearly $100-billion of consumption expenditure in 2007-08, in three groups comprising; Megacities (8), Boomtowns (7), and Niche Cities (5).

The eight Megacities that apart from large population also have large consumer markets are: Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Pune.

The seven Boomtowns that have big population and high expenditure per household are: Surat, Kanpur, Jaipur, Lucknow, Nagpur, Bhopal and Coimbatore.

The five Niche cities that are relatively smaller in population but have above national-average household spend are: Faridabad, Amritsar, Ludhiana, Chandigarh and Jalandhar.