Cities and regional economies

Mumbai’s weekday is still finance, headquarters, media, the port and a dense consumer market. Land is the constraint, which is why redevelopment and the shift of offices to Bandra-Kurla and to Navi Mumbai matter more than a township that exists only on a slide. Delhi NCR’s weekday is government plus the private economy that grew in Gurugram and Noida, because land and building rules in Delhi proper pushed much of the new stock outward. Treating ‘Delhi’ as one office market misplaces the buildings.

Bengaluru, Hyderabad and, to a different degree, Pune and Chennai sell engineering and technology labour to firms elsewhere in India and abroad. Chennai and Pune also make vehicles and parts. Ahmedabad and the wider Gujarat system make, trade and finance, with GIFT City as an international financial centre under its own regulator, physically in Gandhinagar. Kolkata’s formal office growth has been quieter than the southern and western metros, and its consumer market is still one of the largest in the country. The city pages hold the districts. This page is a warning against averaging them.

The south’s factory-and-port system runs through Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The west’s runs through Maharashtra and Gujarat. The north’s consumption and industrial towns sit around Delhi and along the highways into Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. The east is Kolkata plus the resource states, with a thinner density of formal jobs. These are orientations for a reader. This page does not draw them as zones on a fund map.

Jaipur, Lucknow, Kochi, Coimbatore, Indore, Surat, Visakhapatnam and the Chandigarh region are the first names on the tier 2 page. They are there because organised retail, a university, a hospital, an airport or a factory cluster has made them legible to a national firm. They do not add up to one emerging asset. A reader who wants one of them goes to that page and then to the local title. GRIP does not print a national ranking of them.