LEAP Cities Explorer
Which of India's smaller cities have the strongest economies? India's national accounts stop at the state line — no official measure exists for the size or shape of a city's economy below it. The LEAP Cities Index fills that gap for 233 Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, scoring each across eight sectors of economic life, from manufacturing to the living foundation. Rank them, compare any two head-to-head, or read your own state's small-city story.
What is the LEAP Cities Index — and why it matters
Most of what is written about the Indian economy is about the eight big metros. But the next phase of India's urban growth is happening in places like Mangaluru, Kolhapur and Indore — cities large enough to matter and small enough to be invisible in official statistics, because GDP is not estimated below the state level. The index, built by economist Megha Patnaik (India Productivity Lab / LUISS), synthesises 43 variables from official and administrative sources into eight pillars mapped to the sectors of India's Gross Value Added classification, then scores every city 0–100 relative to its peers. It is a ruler for the part of urban India that never had one.
▸ How to read this explorer
- Start with the question. Tap any underlined word to change the view, the pillar, the tier or the state.
- Scores are relative, not absolute. A composite of 68 doesn't mean "68% productive" — it means near the top of these 233 cities. Read gaps and ranks, not levels.
- Four views: Rank the cities on any pillar, Compare two cities pillar by pillar, see the state picture, or list the full sortable table.
- Tier-2 and Tier-3 follow the index's population-based classification — the chips mark each city's tier throughout.
- Every number is the published score from the CC BY 4.0 dataset on Zenodo — nothing here is recomputed or estimated by us.
Making sense of the numbers
What the index measures. The LEAP Cities Index 2026 scores 233 Indian cities outside the eight largest metros — 94 Tier-2 and 139 Tier-3 cities across 23 states and union territories — on the strength of their local economies. It synthesises 43 variables from official and administrative sources into eight pillars, each mapped to a sector of the Gross Value Added (GVA) classification: Manufacturing · Trade & Hospitality · Transport & Logistics · Financial Services · Construction & Capital Formation · Health · Education · Living Foundation. The composite index is the headline 0–100 score.
Reading it responsibly. Scores are relative to this set of cities, not absolute measures of output — use them to compare cities and read profiles, not to claim a city "produces X". A city can rank high on the composite while being weak on a pillar that matters to you: Indore (#3 overall) scores just 49.7 on Education while Mangaluru (#1) scores 89.7 — that is exactly the kind of texture the pillar view exists to show. Small states appear with few cities, so state averages there rest on one or two observations.
What this explorer adds. The official index page presents the ranking on a map. This explorer works the same published scores harder: rank cities on any single pillar (not just the composite), filter by tier and state, put any two cities head-to-head across all eight pillars, aggregate to a state picture, and sort or search the full table. Nothing is recomputed — every figure shown is the published score.
What it can't tell you. The public dataset carries the scores, not the 43 underlying variables, so pillar scores can't be decomposed further here. The index is a snapshot (2026, v1) — it shows where cities stand, not how they got there or where they're heading. And like all composite indices, weighting choices shape the ranking; for methodology, consult the author's site.
Scores are from Patnaik, M. (2026), LEAP Cities India 2026, published on Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21744737) under a CC BY 4.0 licence, via the India Productivity Lab. You can download the full CSV directly. This is an independent, source-linked interface for learning and discussion — ImpactMojo is not affiliated with the India Productivity Lab or LUISS.