Figure 1: Estimated Share of Gross Domestic Product for ‘City-Regions’ (2022-23)
Source: Various reports of State Departments of Economics and Statistics. Anmol Patlan assisted in compiling the data
Figure 1 shows the relationship of the share of ‘city-region’ in the gross domestic product (GDP) with its population share. Kolkata is an outlier, as the only ‘city-region’ whose share in GDP is less than its share in population. For the ten ‘city-regions’, the aggregate share of ‘city-region’ domestic product in GDP was 21.1%, which is more than double that of its population share in 2011, which was 9.6%, reflecting the higher per capita domestic product, compared to the national average, associated with these large ‘city-regions’. Note that this is not all urban, as the ‘city-region’ as defined here, includes both urban and rural populations.
But, unlike China, India does not estimate economic activity at the city level, except Delhi, which is a state-level entity, so, its gross state domestic product (GSDP) is available along with all other states. So, how was this ‘city-region’ domestic product generated? In this situation, the following simple but crude exercise was conducted.
There has been some effort to generate district domestic product estimates (DDP) but these vary widely by state, with some states providing recent updated estimates and others that have not provided estimates for over a decade. The top ten cities by population in 2011 were considered. Each of these ‘city-regions’ were associated with a district or set of districts (for Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata). The Appendix gives the details of the districts that each ‘city-region’ were associated with. For each of these districts (except Jaipur, for which the estimate was directly available), the 2022-23 DDP estimate was calculated in the following manner. For each district, the share of DDP to the state’s GSDP was calculated for the latest two years for which data was available (except the years 2020-21 and 2021-22, which were excluded due to the pandemic). The average share of these two years was then multiplied into the state’s GSDP for 2022-23 to generate the estimated DDP for 2022-23. For ‘city regions’ associated with only one district, the DDP is considered the domestic product for the ‘city-region’ and for ‘city regions’ associated with a set of districts, the sum of the DDP for those districts were taken as the estimate. The specific calculations are given in the Appendix.
