Moreover, the report reveals a particularly notable data point: a city with a population under 1.5 million, positioned at the lowest tier of a four-tier population hierarchy, shares the highest average household income in India with the nation’s tech capital and surpasses all megacities in expenditure. This city is Chandigarh, which the report designates as a Frontier City (among the lowest average household income), a classification unrecognised by its households.Graphics: Manya Aggarwal/ThePrint
The observed anomaly of a ‘Frontier City’ with high average household income’ serves as an entry point into a broader pattern, as Chandigarh is not an isolated case. When India’s 100 largest cities are ranked by population, as the report does, four distinct categories emerge: the Big Six, Boomtowns, Breakout cities, and Frontier cities. These categories provide a defensible framework for organising a country of this magnitude. However, defensible is not the same as descriptive. Notably, none of India’s top five cities by household spending is among the six megacities classified as the pinnacle. Chandigarh and Thiruvananthapuram, categorised as a Frontier city and a mid-sized Boomtown, respectively, surpass Mumbai, Delhi, and Bengaluru in per-household spending. This phenomenon reflects the housing narrative at the city level rather than the price-tier level. Joan Robinson’s 1933 analysis of imperfect competition, which explained why India’s housing supply skewed toward luxury rather than the mass market despite a stable national sales figure, describes this type of market segmentation: a seemingly unified market that, in reality, comprises several distinct markets catering to buyers with divergent behaviours. Population size, like a single quarter’s sales figure, was never meant to capture such nuances.
