silkboard - 23 October, 2007 | Bangalore | India

In a magazine recently, I read a "best cities for business" survey with interest. The Business Today-Synovate survey. Besides being interested in knowing Bangalore's rank - we climbed down from #1 last year to #3 behind Mumbai and Delhi - I also wondered about the method they used for the survey.

The basic approach was to ask a set of people to rank cities on criteria such as availability of power, traffic, cost of living law and order etc. Unless the respondents really know all the cities they rank, how would they be able to compare? Someone from Bangalore may not even know how bad Kolkata traffic is unless the person has been there. To be fair to the surveyors, they claimed to have balanced out the "perceptual" scores with "objective" scores that were fact-based, like the road-length.

I wish Business-Today published all the "objective" data they gathered, but they didn't. Anyway, here are some observations from the perceptive scores:

- Nagpur and Surat were consistently ranked lower than Bangalore and Mumbai on cost of living. Really!!?

- Similarly, Nagpur/Surat/Ahmedabad were consistently ranked below Mumbai and Bangalore on Traffic/Commuting. Is it? May be that lack of organized public transport is the reason. But I still dont get it.

- Hyderabad consistently got bad rank on Pollution Levels, whereas Bangalore was consistently ranked well. I didn't know Hyd was that bad, though Bangalore air does feel better than other Metro cities.

- B-school students ranked Bangalore #1 on Career Oppotunities, ahead of Delhi (#2) and Mumbai (#3). Interesting, isn't it.

There is a lot more if you like reading between the lines in these surveys. Go get Business-Today, August 26 2007, if you can still find one.

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