The 20 cities with the lowest cost of living 16 in India

By Nathan Giannini | Yahoo Finance – 20 hours ago Local vendor sells beans at his vegetable stall at the food market of Kottayam on December 28, 2009 in Kottayam near Trivandrum, Kerala, India. (Photo by EyesWideOpen/Getty Images) The city with the lowest relative cost of living in the world is Thiruvananthapuram, India. That’s according to rankings published by data company Numbeo. The company continuously updates its data and just published its Cost of Living Index Rate for 2017. The list is calculated relative to New York City, which has an index of 100. If a city has a cost of living index of 130, it is 30 percent more expensive than New York; if a city has an index of 70, it is 30 percent less expensive. Thiruvananthapuram has a rating of 19.83. A 1-bedroom apartment in the center of the coastal city costs as little as $89 per month to rent. In fact, 16 of the 20 least expensive cities on the list are in the vast South Asian nation. Since the country is so large, it’s able to produce the majority of its goods domestically, without having to import more expensive products from other countries. India cost of living India (in the middle of this map) is home to 16 of the top 20 cities with the lowest cost of living in the world. (Courtesy of Numbeo) Abhijit Banerjee, professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told The Independent of India: “There’s a very large population, so people are willing to work for very little, which means goods stay cheap.” Famers working in the fields near Bhubaneswar, India Village living farmers look at their vegetable agricultural field and plucking cucumbers to supply it to nearest market for sale outskirts of the eastern Indian city Bhubaneswar, on December 12, 2016. Maximum village farmers are facing problem to sale their vegetables due to distress sale after the demonetization in India. (Photo by STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images) Only two other nations are represented in the bottom 20: Ukraine and Egypt. Here’s the bottom 20: 445. Chandigarh, India: 25.93 446. Goa, India: 25.88 447. Ahmedabad, India: 25.86 448. Surat, India: 25.85 449. Lucknow (Lakhnau), India: 25.81 450. Jaipur, India: 25.62 451. Vadodara, India: 25.53 452. Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine: 25.29 453. Sumy, Ukraine: 24.75 454. Indore, India: 24.38 455. Lviv, Ukraine: 24.32 456. Hyderabad, India: 24.05 457. Kochi, India: 23.58 458. Visakhapatnam, India: 23.54 459. Nagpur, India: 23.47 460. Coimbatore, India: 23.36 461. Bhubaneswar, India: 23.25 462. Cairo, Egypt: 22.29 463. Mangalore, India: 21.89 464. Thiruvananthapuram, India: 19.83 For comparison, the most expensive cost of living in the world is Hamilton, Bermuda, with an index of 141.59, 10 points higher than the second-most expensive city on the list, Geneva, Switzerland. Seven of the top 10 cities on the list are in Switzerland. Numbeo published this map showing the cost of living in nearly 500 cities around the world. Red dots indicate expensive cities and green less expensive. Courtesy of Numbeo @YahooSG on Twitter