Small Town versus Metro Cost of Living Comparison

Added Jul 2026 3 design docs

Every year lakhs of students leave towns like Jhansi, Bhagalpur and Nanded for Delhi, Pune or Bengaluru, and almost all of them discover within a month that the number printed in the offer letter means something entirely different once rent, travel and a plate of food have been paid for. A 32,000 rupee salary can feel generous in one place and tight in the other, yet nobody hands a 21-year-old the conversion table that would settle the question. Comparing two places properly is a real economics problem, because it needs a comparable basket, honest weights and an index, not just a few anecdotes about how expensive the metro is.

The intern builds that conversion table for one pair of places: their own home town and one metro of their choice. Forty comparable line items across housing, food, transport, utilities, education and discretionary spending are priced in both places, weighted with published consumption shares and turned into a cost of living index in google-sheets, along with a salary equivalence calculator that converts any town income into its metro equivalent. The findings become a 12-16 page comparison dossier and a ten-slide decision deck built in powerpoint, with a one-page city cost card designed in canva for a college placement noticeboard.

Completing the project takes the intern through index number construction, weighting and sensitivity testing, real versus nominal income, purchasing power reasoning and the discipline of making two very different places genuinely comparable. Placement cells, banks, market research firms and policy think tanks all run some version of this analysis, and a public repository containing an original two-city cost study gives the intern something specific and defensible to talk about in an interview.

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