[108]

That's right. Food and gas is cheaper back home (USA) than it is in India, where the cost of living is astronomical vis-a-vis the paycheck drawn by the average Indian. A per-item price comparison shows vegetables and meat are a lot cheaper (and cleaner) in the US than what I find in India. Metro cities like Mumbai and Bangalore are very expensive when it comes to rental costs, transportation costs and entertainment costs. Have you checked out how much beer/alcohol costs in pubs in Mumbai and Bangalore. Let me tell you, its way more than what we pay in the USA.

Schooling is the most expensive - there is no free public schooling worth sending your kid to. A good school can cost INR. 100,000 per year and even the poorest person I met aspires and scrapes money to be able to afford the astronomical fees required to send their kid to a "private English-medium" school.

[bshastry]

http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...

[108]

How old are those numbers? Lets take one listing for an Apartment (3 bedrooms) in City Centre: Houston, TX is listed as $2,050.00 while Bangalore is $ 559.02. If you check out a property listing site: <http://www.magicbricks.com/propertyDetails/3-BHK-3000-Sq-ft-..., it says INR.60,000 which works out to approximately $1153.84 (around 52 rupees to a dollar). Obviously, numbeo.com has got the most important (housing) numbers wrong.

[bshastry]

> How old are those numbers?

Numbeo says it is up to date (April, 2013 for Houston data and May 2013, for Bangalore data). I feel that the (Bangalore) housing numbers are reasonably accurate because: 1. Data being crowd-sourced with no real incentive for contributors to lie; 2. Going by personal experience

> If you check out a property listing site: <http://www.magicbricks.com/propertyDetails/3-BHK-3000-Sq-ft-..., it says INR.60,000 which works out to approximately $1153.84 (around 52 rupees to a dollar). Obviously, numbeo.com has got the most important (housing) numbers wrong.

This is a texas sharpshooter argument. It is based on a single data point---which happens to be a 5-floor multi-storey apartment---which is hardly a representative sample of (single floor) 3-BHK apartments in central Bangalore. Claiming that numbeo has got housing numbers wrong by this one data point alone is ridiculous.

[seanmcdirmid]

I checked for China, they seem to be pretty accurate for here at least. I have no idea about India.