The Many Urban Indias report by Tata Sons and PRICE gives a real feel for how urban India (the top 100 cities) earns, spends, saves, and behaves right now. Almost every page has something counterintuitive on it.
I compiled some of the sharper data points in the charts below. Highlights:
Chandigarh, Thiruvananthapuram, Vadodara, Tiruppur and Surat are India's top 5 cities by average household spending. Not Delhi NCR, Mumbai or Bengaluru.
Bengaluru and Chandigarh are actually India's richest cities by average household income (₹28.3L)
Urban India spends $844 billion a year. Food, housing and transport alone eat up 75% of it, and durables plus entertainment combined are under 5%.
Fruits, vegetables and dairy now make up 37% of urban food budgets, more than cereals and pulses combined.
The top 15 cities generate roughly two-thirds of all 100 cities' consumption. Delhi NCR alone ($126bn) is nearly as big as Mumbai and Bengaluru put together.
Delhi NCR's household spending on transport alone ($33bn) is bigger than all of Pune's entire consumption market.
Weekends make up 62% of weekly spending in India's top cities. Jaipur spends 2.76x more on weekends than weekdays; Dhanbad barely spends more at all.
Middle-income households (₹6-36L) will be 60% of India's top 100 cities by 2031, up from just 29% a decade ago.
The Big Six actually has more low-income households (24%) than the smaller Boomtown, Breakout or Frontier cities.
Boomtowns (2.5-10M people), not the Big Six, have India's highest share of dual-income households (26.5%), up from ~21% a decade ago.