New Global index shows Delhi is India’s ‘best city’, but none from India makes it to top 300 list

New Delhi: A new report from Oxford that ranks cities worldwide on parameters such as economic output and quality of life shows that no Indian city has broken into the top 300. Even Delhi, which scored the highest, stands at 350, shows Oxford Economics’ new ‘Global Cities Index’.

The first-ever edition of the index, released on 21 May by the global advisory firm Oxford Economics, aims to look at metropolitan cities across 163 countries and assess them on different parameters.

The best city across all five parameters assessed in the report — economics, human capital, quality of life, environment, and governance — is New York, followed by London and San Jose.

While the economics category is measured by factors such as GDP size, employment opportunities and GDP per person, quality of life is measured by life expectancy, housing costs and income per person. Environment is measured in terms of air quality, temperature, and rainfall anomalies, as well as emissions intensity.

Meanwhile, another important category is human capital which “encompasses the collective knowledge and skills of a city’s population,” the report said. It is measured using the educational qualifications of residents, quality of universities and other institutes, age profile and population growth demographics as well as the number of corporate headquarters present in the city.

In this demographic, New Delhi ranks 51 out of 1,000 cities, beating cities like Geneva, Canberra, and Barcelona. The best city in this category was London.

Ninety-one cities in India were ranked in this report, and the one with the worst overall ranking is Uttar Pradesh’s Sultanpur. The city ranked last in the index, having scored below 950 in four categories — environment, quality of life, economics, and human capital.

In governance, calculated at the national level, it stood at 380.

Sultanpur isn’t the only Indian city that did poorly — the index showed that eight Indian cities featured in the lowest 25.

According to the report, in 2023, the 1,000 largest cities of the world made up 60 percent of its GDP and 30 percent of its population. It used publicly available datasets to calculate a holistic review of cities across North America, Western Europe, East Asia, South Asia, and other such regions.

Where Indian cities stand

None of the top 10 best cities of the world in the report are from South Asia — the region whose cities rank the lowest in most parameters.

A look at the report also shows that most Indian cities didn’t do well, with even Delhi faring badly in all except one. In particular, it ranked 975 out of 1,000 cities in the environment and 838 in quality of life.

While other top metro cities in India such as Mumbai, Chennai, and Bengaluru also fared abysmally in terms of quality of life — ranking 915, 879, and 847, respectively — certain south Indian cities such Kannur, Madurai, and Thiruvananthapuram scored in the 700s in that parameter.

According to the report, five of the top 10 cities in the world are in the US. Of the rest, three are in Europe, one in Japan, and one in Australia.

In terms of region, North America has the best cities, while Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have the worst.

The report warns that impending crises like migration, housing crises, and the need for better healthcare infrastructure could affect the rankings in the future. It also points out how climate change would impact not just the environment category but also others due to looming high temperatures and more natural disasters.

(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)