Best cities, or so we say
You are laughing. Laughing at the superlative, laughing at the irony. Yeah, we know. More than once last fortnight, you spent some three or four hours stuck in traffic. You live in Mumbai or Delhi. One is India's commercial capital-and the #1 city for business, according to our survey-and the other is its political capital. There aren't any other cities bigger or better than them, we are told. But any city that treats you like this, ought not to be described in superlative terms. We agree. So, thank you, readers, for not burning us, along with this issue, at the stake.
Yet, incredible as it might seem, Indian cities are getting better. Delhi, gearing up to host the Commonwealth Games in 2010, has unclogged its so-called Ring Road (the chaos that you see in the picture above is recent and at an intersection that leads to the airport); it has added, and fairly successfully, a metro service that has eased everyday commuting for thousands of people; and it has also cleaned up its air. Those are some reasons why Delhi displaces Bangalore as the #2 city in the BT-Synovate survey of India's Best Cities for Business 2007.
Mumbai remains #1 not because of its upgrade in infrastructure, although the state government has set an ambitious investment target of Rs 2,30,000 crore and the top bureaucrat in charge of its special urban projects says that the city ought to be comparing itself with Dubai or Singapore, and not Hyderabad or Bangalore.
Far away from the glare of national media, Gujarat seems to be getting its act together. Ahmedabad has dislodged Pune to claim the #7 position, while another Gujarat city, Surat, has also gained a rank to jump to #9. This is no coincidence. As the following story explains, Gujarat has taken up urban renewal seriously. Both the cities are improving urban mass transport (now, CNG buses ply on their roads), and businesses like Reliance Retail see big opportunities there.
There's a massive urban renewal programme that the government has initiated under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), envisaging an investment of Rs 1,20,000 crore in 63 cities (see Business Today, August 13, 2006 for more details on the mission). Understandably, renewing cities is a long and arduous process. The good news is we have got started. The bad news is the cities aren't moving fast enough.
How they rank them
Top 10 cities by respondent category.
1. Mumbai: Remains the jet set engine of commerce
2. Delhi: Connectivity and air quality have improved, thanks to the metro
3. Bangalore: Gets a thumbs down from CEOs
How we did it
The first time business today published its Best Cities for Business survey was in 1994. Since then, we have published six of those surveys, including this one. Our research partner this year was one again Synovate, a global market research firm. Here's how Business Today and Synovate went about the survey:
The Objective: The rationale behind the survey has always been the same: To rate top cities in terms of their business appeal. Broadly, we wanted to find out the quality of work life, the quality of social life and suitability for doing business.
The Universe: The most important 15 Indian cities-Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Pune, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Surat, Lucknow, Jaipur, Indore, Kanpur and Patna-were identified for inclusion in the survey.
Respondents: The research was conducted among a select group of respondents, picked from six different categories: CEOs and industrialists; self-employed professionals; senior managers; policy makers (government officials and bureaucrats); spouses of executives; and B-school students. A total of 1,614 respondents were polled. Synovate researchers conducted telephonic interviews using a structured questionnaire. Respondents who refused to be telephonically interviewed were met personally.
The Parameters: To arrive at the Perceptual Score, 36 parameters were drawn up and broadly divided into four heads: Physical infrastructure, social infrastructure, labour and government support, and market potential. The parameters were assigned weightages depending on their importance as rated by the respondents. To arrive at the Objective Score, a master-list of parameters was drawn up. From this list, 10 parameters were culled for which statistics on the states, districts and cities were available.
The Scoring: The following method was used to arrive at the Perceptual Score. A net score was derived for every city under each parameter. All respondents voted to give a particular rating to each city on each parameter. The ratings were on a 10-point scale. Following this, each parameter was given a specific weightage based on the number of respondents who had voted it to be important or not important as far as its contribution to the overall attractiveness of the city as a business destination is concerned. This gave the Perceptual Scores among each respondent category for all the parameters. For the Objective Score, the available data for each particular parameter was considered-for example, the total length of roads in a city, the presence or absence of airports. Some of the negative parameters such as crime rate and pollution were, however, assigned scores in a reverse order-a minus one for 'high' and a plus one for 'low'. The overall score for each city was arrived at by giving a weightage of 0.7 to the Perceptual Score and 0.3 to the Objective Score. Finally, to come to the individual city score, the following weightages were multiplied to the consolidated score: CEOs and self-employed professionals were assigned a weightage of 0.25 each, senior managers and policy makers (government officials and bureaucrats) 0.15 each, and spouses of executives and B-school students 0.10 each.
(The Synovate team consisted of Rahul Varma, Associate Director, Quantitative Research, and Swapnadeep Mitra, Senior Research Executive, Quantitative Research)
