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Sudhanshu Ranade

Chennai , July 16

Of the 285 million people who lived in 5,161 urban settlements in 2001, 74 million, i.e. about one-quarter, lived in 27 `million plus towns'.

Actually, the number of such towns is just 22 if one aggregates figures for adjoining townships such as Kolkata and Howrah, Delhi and Faridabad, Pune and Pimpri/Chinchwad and Mumbai, Thane and Kalyan.

Though in the absence of additional data, such as, income tax collections in various towns or motor vehicle registrations, it is hard to say what portion of total urban spend these 22 settlements account for, we may not be too far wrong in guessing that average household consumer expenditure in these 22 towns is, say, 2.5 times the Rs 56,000 figure reported by NSS for all urban households in 2003.

Apart from allowing us to cut down the number of million plus cities from 27 to 22, a look at Census 2001 data in its totality also allows us to identify another 21 towns with population size ranging from 7,00,000 to just under 1 million (there were four such towns in 2001, Allahabad, Amritsar, Vishakapatnam and Rajkot, all of which have probably crossed the 1 million mark by now).

Taken together these 43 towns, less than one per cent of the total, account for 32 per cent of India's total urban population. The 21 `million-minus' towns added to the earlier 22, too, probably spend rather more per household per year than do the remaining 5,118 census towns.

In mapping out marketing strategy to reach consumers in urban areas, for boosting sales of FMCGs, durables, banking, insurance and mutual funds, the best thing to do would probably be to focus on these 43 towns, plus the 25-30 key towns such as Mangalore and Kochi that have a population of around half a million each, and treat the remaining Census towns as being simply feeders for rural markets.

A list of the top 43 towns follows, with population figures in millions given in brackets: Mumbai (14.2), Delhi (11.3), Kolkata (5.6), Bangalore (4.3), Chennai (4.2), Hyderabad (3.7), Pune (3.6), Ahmedabad (3.5), Kanpur (2.6), Surat (2.4), Jaipur (2.3), Lucknow (2.3), Nagpur (2.1), Indore (1.6), Bhopal (1.4), Ludhiana (1.4), Patna (1.4), Vadodara (1.3), Agra (1.3), Varanasi (1.1), Nashik (1.1), Meerut (1.1), Allahabad (0.99), Amritsar (0.99), Visakhapatnam (0.97), Rajkot (0.97), Coimbatore (0.92), Madurai (0.90), Srinagar (0.90), Solapur (0.87), Aurangabad (0.87), Ranchi (0.85), Jodhpur (0.85), Gwalior (0.83),Vijayawada (0.83), Chandigarh (0.81), Guwahati (0.81), Trichy (0.75), Jalandhar (0.74), Bareilly (0.73), Kota (0.71), Salem (0.70). The total population of the 43 towns listed above is 91.7 million.

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