Sahibzada Ajit Singh Nagar, better known as Mohali, the cricket venue near Chandigarh, has the distinction of having the highest share of graduates in its population among all Indian cities. Nearly 44% of its residents are either graduates or above.

Another Chandigarh neighbour Panchkula, which falls in Haryana has the second highest share at 39%. Others in the top 10 include Bidhan Nagar, popularly called Salt Lake city in Kolkata, Gurgaon, a suburb of Delhi and Alandur, in Chennai.

These details are drawn from data on educational levels of cities collected during Census 2011 and released recently. A total of 505 cities are included, ranging from Jehanabad in Bihar with a population of 6.6 lakh to the giant Mumbai Municipal Corporation with a population of over 96 lakh. They represent 45% of urban India.

About 6% of India's population was graduate or above in 2011. One third of this stayed in rural areas while two thirds was concentrated in urban areas.

The Census office follows its own methodology of classification which does not always harmonise with other authorities, or with common sense. For instance urban Delhi is divided up into the New Delhi Municipal Committee (NDMC), the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) and several census towns which would actually come under the jurisdiction of the MCD. These were created as categories many decades back but continue as units even now.

Bidhan Nagar, Panchkula and SAS Nagar were the top three cities (in that order) in the previous Census too in 2001. They are urban areas that evolved as residences of educated middle class in the 1980s and 1990s. Both Bidhan Nagar and Panchkula house a large number of state government offices and institutions, with those who work in them staying nearby.

In 2001, again because of a Census office peculiarity, the NDMC was broken up into several parts and counted as separate units. This led to four of these parts figuring in the top ten. This time round, NDMC has been aggregated into one unit, and it comes in at the tenth spot.

Gurgaon was placed at the 15th spot and Noida at the 14th in 2001. Both have since moved into the top ten, pushing NDMC behind. Two cities from Uttarakhand, its capital Dehradun and the educational hub Roorkee have moved up into the top rankings. Dehradun became the capital in 2001 drawing within it an explosion of government employees besides being a base for several institutions since the British times. Roorkee's famous engineering college was upgraded to a full-fledged IIT in 2001. Both Dehradun and Roorkee are major army cantonments too.

So where are the big metropolises of India in this ranking? Delhi is divided up into several smaller units. Many of Delhi's Census towns, surprisingly, are near the bottom of the 505 cities in the Census list. The reason is that these areas, like Sultanpur Majra, Mustafabad, Kirari, Bhalaswa Jehangirpuri, are populated by working class and poorer sections of Delhi. The share of graduates and above in their populations are between 5 and 6 percent.

Chennai clocks in at number 53 with about 24 percent graduate and above population, Kolkata is at 79 with 22 percent and Greater Mumbai makes the list at 192 with about 19 percent graduates and above.

At the very bottom of the ranking are small towns, mostly with industrial populations. The five cities with least number of graduates or above are Jamuria and Dabgram, suburbs of Asansol and Siliguri respectively in West Bengal, and Bhiwandi (Mah), Loni (UP) and Botad (Gujarat), all industrial townships. Loni is at the outskirts of Delhi.

