Delhi has more households earning over Rs 10 lakh a year than any other city in India, followed by Bangalore and Mumbai. Chandigarh has the largest concentration of such families with every seventh household there having a seven-figure annual income.

Contrary to what you might expect, even ranked by the absolute number of households with incomes of Rs 10 lakh or more per year, the metros aren’t all on top of the list, with Chennai ranked 9th, Hyderabad 12th and Kolkata a lowly 26th.

On top of the list are Delhi, with 1.38 lakh such households, and Bangalore, with 1.05 lakh families. Mumbai comes in third at just over 1 lakh millionaire households, but if you add the roughly 74,000 millionaires families that Thane has to Mumbai’s tally, it would jump right to the top of the list.
These statistics emerge from Indicus Analytics’ yet-to-be-released report, Housing Skyline of India 2007-08, which collates data on several parameters related to housing and households for India’s top 100 urban centers from a variety of sources.

Between them, the 100 cities have just over 1.5 million households with Rs 10 lakh-plus annual incomes.

Surat far ahead of Chennai in number of millionaires

In the national list of cities with millionaires, in absolute terms, Pune, Ahmedabad, Surat and Chandigarh are ahead of Chennai and Hyderabad. If Thiruvallur and Kancheepuram were added to Chennai; urban areas of North 24 Parganas and Haora to Kolkata; and urban areas of Rangareddi to Hyderabad, the numbers would change somewhat. Chennai would then have about 61,000 millionaire households, but that would still be only a little more than Pune’s. Hyderabad, with about 35,000 millionaire households, would have only just a little more than Chandigarh, and Kolkata’s 36,000 would place it in a similar range.

What is more interesting is what happens when we look at the proportion of households in different cities that are in the million-plus annual income bracket. Chandigarh then emerges a clear No. 1 with over 15% of families in this high-income slab and the rest of the top 10 is not at all what you would expect.

Silvassa, the capital of Dadra & Nagar Haveli, is in the second spot, followed by Rupnagar in Punjab, Kohima in Nagaland and Goa. Patiala, Jamshedpur, Jalandhar, Thiruvananthapuram and Shimla round off the unexpected top 10.

What about the metros? Bangalore has the highest proportion of millionaire households among them, but it’s only about one in 15 families in the Karnataka capital that are in this elite club. This puts Bangalore at rank 17 on the list. Delhi is next at rank 40 with just over one in 25 households having million-plus incomes. Mumbai is ranked 52nd, Chennai 67th and Kolkata 91st.

The regional patterns are also not entirely what you might expect. The North-east has a higher proportion of millionaire households (5.1%) than any other region, followed by the North (4.6%) and the West (4.2%). The booming South has only 3.8% of urban households in this high-income bracket, just a touch lower than the average of 3.9% for all 100 cities.

Central India, which includes cities in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, does better than the East, while the lowest proportions are for the cities off the mainland, that is in Andamans and Lakshadweep.


Source: TOI