Ahmedabad Best, Kolkata Worst!
Mumbai: Ahmedabad is the best of India’s mega-cities , edging out Pune, Mumbai and Delhi in a very close contest. That’s the key finding of an exclusive opinion poll conducted for The Times of India by leading market research firm IMRB across India’s eight biggest urban centres. But before residents of these cities start celebrating, here’s a sobering fact. Even the best rated of them barely made it to a rating of “average” on a scale ranging from “very poor” to “very good” . Clearly, there’s a long long way to go before any of them can claim to be world-class . The cities chosen for the survey had populations of 5 million or more according to the 2011 census. Most cities have their areas of strength and weakness in a matrix of 30 parameters. However, bottom-placed Kolkata showed up as a laggard on most counts. The results throw up an interesting poser: Could it be more than a coincidence that Ahmedabad and Pune, which are at the top of the rankings, are also the two smallest cities on the list? Perhaps India’s cities manage reasonably when they are of middling size by metropolitan standards but find it increasingly difficult to cope as they grow beyond a certain size. The experience of Bangalore certainly seems to suggest that. The two really big cities that have also done quite well in the rankings, Delhi and Mumbai, also have historical advantages, one by virtue of being the political capital and a virtual city-state and the other due to its long reign as the country’s commercial capital.
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