Data For India

As someone who comes to India's statistics as an outsider with an open mind, I am often enlightened by a definitional category that I was unaware of. I did not know that "Lady Health Visitors" were a category of healthcare professionals until my colleague Nileena Suresh mentioned them in her work on the availability of skilled healthcare professionals in India. I did not know how formal jobs were defined until my colleague Abhishek Waghmare investigated that for us.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) defines intentional homicide as "unlawful death inflicted upon a person with the intent to cause death or serious injury". In India, the UNODC includes the crimes of murder, culpable homicide not amounting to murder, and dowry death based on the reports of India's National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), as intentional homicide. The total number of victims of intentional homicide has reduced since 1990 according to this data.

Most big shifts track the share of people who had something or did something in the past in India, against the share of people who have or do it now. Underlying this is one basic assumption: we need to know reliably how many people were there in the past and how many people are there now for all of this to be meaningful. Unfortunately, we are currently the furthest we have ever been from knowing this credibly.

There is no separate kitchen space to cook food in more than one in four rural households in India. Even in urban areas, nearly one in five households where cooking takes place indoors do not have a separate kitchen. The National Family Health Survey, conducted in 2019-21, asked household heads whether cooking is usually done inside the house, in a separate building, or outdoors. If cooking was done inside the house, the survey further asked whether there is a separate room used as a kitchen.

Every once in a while, I have to write not about a big shift, but about the absence of a big shift. That India has a large informal workforce is known. But one of the changes that you might have expected to see in India's economy and workforce over time is a growing formalisation, and the conversion of precarious informal jobs into formal ones. In labour terms, it's one of the biggest shifts that is conspicuous by its absence.

The gross domestic product (GDP) of a country reflects the size of its economy. It is its most important economic statistic, acting as a universal denominator for macro-economic ratios.[1] In this piece, we explain how Indian statisticians calculate the country's GDP, the methodological debates around them, and the revisions made in 2026. The two sides of the macroeconomic ledger There are two main ways to arrive at a country's GDP figures.

One of the best measures to understand warming is through temperature anomalies. A temperature anomaly is the departure of the temperature for a particular year from a baseline. Positive anomalies indicate warmer than average conditions, while negative anomalies indicate cooler conditions when compared to the baseline.

One of the things that we're passionate about at Data For India, and that I'd argue we do both well and uniquely, is to interrogate datasets. Our job as we see it is not just to work with the data to explain India, but also to look more closely at the underlying data itself. Better data, and a better understanding of this data helps strengthen the entire data ecosystem. Nowhere is this more evident than in our work on mortality estimation.

Having a graduate degree is an important marker of educational achievement, and is linked to greater access to more skilled and better-paying jobs. People who have completed an undergraduate programme are considered to be graduates. This also includes those who are either enrolled in or have completed post-graduate degrees or diplomas, or doctoral programmes, after completing an undergraduate degree.

Topics list close Editions list close There is no separate kitchen space to cook food in more than one in four rural households in India. Even in urban areas, nearly one in five households where cooking takes place indoors do not have a separate kitchen. The National Family Health Survey, conducted in 2019-21, asked household heads whether cooking is usually done inside the house, in a separate building, or outdoors.