Three Centuries of Work = 1 Luxury Flat in Mumbai

That’s approximately how many years of slogging it would take to buy a 100 square metre (about 1,076 square feet) “luxury residence” in Mumbai according to this Bloomberg report. Which makes us not only the least affordable city in the world, but also the most screwed. Our Shanghai counterparts in comparison would require just 233 years of work, while New Yorkers need to endure the rat race for just 48.4 years. The cost, incidentally, of a 100 square metre pad in Mumbai, comes to about $1.14 million (about Rs5.8 crore). While everyone, including the good folks at The Atlantic, have jumped on the ignominy of our ranking, it seems they’ve bungled up their math in all the excitement: 100 square metres isn’t 328 square feet as Atlantic writer Jordan Weissmann points out, but 1,076 square feet. Which makes us marginally lesser chumps than he thinks we are.