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Rukmini Shrinivasan

Chennai
As seen in: The Economic Times, The Times of India, The Hindu, The New Indian Express, Data For India
Knowledge from data for everyone. Founder, @dataforin. Book: "Whole Numbers & Half Truths" (Westland '21).
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Articles by Rukmini Shrinivasan

The twilight of our youth

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
One of the reasons that we set Data For India up is because not having access to data and data-driven insights about India can lead to inaccurate narratives developing and taking hold over public discourse. This is certainly the case when it comes to India's demographics. The narrative about India being a young country is quite deeply ingrained in our vision of ourselves.
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Sewing solo | The Big Shift

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
One of the biggest labour stories of the last eight years is the increase in women in India's manufacturing workforce. As I pointed out in an earlier edition of The Big Shift, that growth, as my colleague Nileena Suresh finds, is heavily driven by one activity alone - 'custom tailoring'. India now has 12 million custom tailors, and one in six manufacturing workers is a custom tailor. Of the 14 million new manufacturing jobs added between 2018 and 2024, five million were in custom tailoring alone.
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Legal burdens | The Big Shift

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
In most areas, it's an exciting time to be in the business of problem-solving for India. The big developing country problems - infant mortality, maternal mortality, preventable deaths from infectious diseases, extreme poverty - are beginning to recede, and drilling down to find where the problems now remain is fascinating and rewarding.
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The Roaring Twenties | The Big Shift

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
One of the unusual characteristics of the fertility transition in India is that fertility rates have declined, even while women have their children quite young. This is quite different from how it is unfolding in Northern Europe, North America or East Asia, where women are getting married and having children much later, and having fewer children.
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Full stack | The Big Shift

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
In our use of charts at Data For India, we are very conscious of two sometimes conflicting aims - the chart should be simple, and the chart should look good. One of the styles of charting that creates the most conflict around this principle is the stacked chart. I'll explain through this week's big shift, which is on the increase in the availability of healthcare professionals relative to the population in India.
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Learning on the job Original

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
A term that I've learnt from the economists and statisticians on my team is "decomposition". It is what it sounds like - splitting an aggregate indicator into its parts to better understand the micro-changes going on inside, separate from what the whole seems to suggest. My colleague Nileena Suresh does that effectively in her work for us in vocational training.
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Salary freeze | The Big Shift

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
In his work for us on salaried employment, my colleague Abhishek Waghmare finds, as you would expect, that most of the conditions of employment around salaried work are marked improvements upon the other forms of working arrangements out there - casual work and self-employment. That's why the big shift a country would like to see is an increase in salaried employment. But there's a further dimension here.
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Cooked | The Big Shift

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
The one-line summary of so many of the big shifts that we look at when it comes to access to assets and amenities is this: things are better than they were, but they could still get better for everyone. That's certainly the case when it comes to cooking fuel. For my piece on what cooking fuel Indian households primarily use, I worked with my colleague Pragnya Reddy to create a time series of the cooking fuel that households reported to surveyors over time as being their main source of energy.
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Heating up | The Big Shift

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
As someone without a background in climate science, I have in general found research and writing on warming to be fairly impenetrable. One of the principles that we follow at Data For India is to minimise the use of modelled data because it places a layer between the data and people, and we'd rather work with the raw data directly. So much of the writing on climate is built around modelled data, adding to the impenetrability.
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Safer times | The Big Shift

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
Some of the disbelief that communicating data in India is met with is uniquely Indian; the surprise that we encounter every time we share our work on the vast majority of Indians being meat-eaters, for instance, is a uniquely Indian experience. Some of this is universal; across the world, for instance, the rich misidentify themselves as middle class. Also universal - the conviction that your city or country is much less safe than the numbers suggest.
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Lady tailors | The Big Shift

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
In an earlier edition of this newsletter, I mentioned my colleague Nileena Suresh's striking findings on the silent growth of 'custom tailoring' as a manufacturing activity in India, particularly that over a third of the new manufacturing jobs added over the last six years were in custom tailoring alone, meaning that one in six manufacturing workers is now a custom tailor.
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Open for business | The Big Shift

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
If there's one thing that the last five years have taught us, it is that international relations in the global economy are going to be hard to forecast. The shock of the pandemic may be receding, but first the tariff wars, and then the US/Israel-Iran conflict have once again shown that 'world order' is a tenuous term, and economic ties will remain unpredictable. This becomes particularly important when it comes to India's trade with the world.
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Drawn by hand | The Big Shift

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
The big shift when it comes to drinking water in India is that most Indians now have access to safe and clean drinking water, as I found in my work for us. At the beginning of the 2000s, fewer than 80% of Indians had access to basic drinking water, while by 2022, 95% of Indian households had access to basic drinking water, a rate of progress that surpassed the world's on average.
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College-goers | The Big Shift

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
Historically, one of the major concerns about girls in the Indian education system was their higher drop-out rates on account of a range of issues including the lack of toilets, concerns about safety, gendered expectations of household labour, and social norms around marriage and women's work.
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Cold comforts | The Big Shift

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
Thanks to an unusually cool and long "winter" this year in Chennai, my thoughts have turned to air-conditioning only in March. Growing up in Pune and Mumbai, I neither had air conditioning nor knew anyon e who did, and this was not unusual but for the time and the region. But after living in Delhi and Chennai, two things became glaringly apparent - economic class and geographic location are key determinants of air conditioner/ cooler ownership.
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Sickness and health | The Big Shift

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
In economic literature, the stories of how now-rich countries developed can allow us to picture, even if not predict, how India's development might look. These are, as I said, not predictive pathways - India's manufacturing journey, for instance, is one such example of a well-marked path that we have not taken. But in many other areas, we can see India's future in other countries' shadows.
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The Big Shift

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
How India’s demographics are changing, with falling fertility and slowing population growth, and what the future holds. What makes Indians sick, what makes them better, and the historic transformations in Indian health. The sectors that make up the Indian economy, how they compare with other countries, and how they have changed over time. Access to household assets and amenities across India, differences between groups and how it is changing.
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Open for business | The Big Shift

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
If there's one thing that the last five years have taught us, it is that international relations in the global economy are going to be hard to forecast. The shock of the pandemic may be receding, but first the tariff wars, and then the US/Israel-Iran conflict have once again shown that 'world order' is a tenuous term, and economic ties will remain unpredictable. This becomes particularly important when it comes to India's trade with the world.
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Getting sick in India

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
In economic literature, the stories of how now-rich countries developed can allow us to picture, even if not predict, how India's development might look. These are, as I said, not predictive pathways - India's manufacturing journey, for instance, is one such example of a well-marked path that we have not taken. But in many other areas, we can see India's future in other countries' shadows.
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Fuel for cooking

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
Having risen steadily over time, the share of Indian households who use Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) as their primary source of fuel for cooking is now at 60% as of 2024. Another 33% of households still used firewood.
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Lady tailors

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
In an earlier edition of this newsletter, I mentioned my colleague Nileena Suresh's striking findings on the silent growth of 'custom tailoring' as a manufacturing activity in India, particularly that over a third of the new manufacturing jobs added over the last six years were in custom tailoring alone, meaning that one in six manufacturing workers is now a custom tailor.
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The baby boom years

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By Nileena Suresh, Abhishek Waghmare, Ishan Deodhar, Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
One of the most interesting stories in Indian demographics, and one that reminds me that my social circle is not reflective of broader Indian realities, is the age at which women have children. As I found in my work on women's age at childbirth, the median Indian woman still has her first child very early, at just over 21 years of age.
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Drawn by hand | The Big Shift

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
The big shift when it comes to drinking water in India is that most Indians now have access to safe and clean drinking water, as I found in my work for us. At the beginning of the 2000s, fewer than 80% of Indians had access to basic drinking water, while by 2022, 95% of Indian households had access to basic drinking water, a rate of progress that surpassed the world's on average.
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Cold comforts

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
Thanks to an unusually cool and long "winter" this year in Chennai, my thoughts have turned to air-conditioning only in March. Growing up in Pune and Mumbai, I neither had air conditioning nor knew anyon e who did, and this was not unusual but for the time and the region. But after living in Delhi and Chennai, two things became glaringly apparent - economic class and geographic location are key determinants of air conditioner/ cooler ownership.
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The first days of life

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
That infancy, or the first year of life, is one of the most vulnerable periods was something that I was aware of. My own work on mortality, for example, had shown me that across all age groups, six in every 1,000 people die every year in India, but among infants alone, 26 in every 1,000 die. What I was more surprised by is how sharply the risk of infant mortality is compressed into the first days of a child's life.
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Brick by brick

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
A point that we've made before in this newsletter is about the stagnation of manufacturing, both in terms of employment, and in terms of contribution to economic value added. But something that we've paid less attention to is where the big shift in industry actually did come from, and that's construction.
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Age distribution in Indian states

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
India is a relatively young country. Half of India's population is under the age of 30, making it a far younger country than its European, North American and East Asian counterparts. The median American or Chinese person, for instance, is over a decade older than the median Indian. However, the country is ageing. From the early 1970s, the share of children (aged 0-14) in the population began to decline, and from the 1980s, the share of young adults (14-29 year-olds) in the population began to fall.
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Access to drinking water

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Data For India
Access to clean drinking water is one of the most important conditions for human health. Most Indians now have access to clean drinking water, but progress on tap water has been slower. Improved access to drinking water Over time, the definition of access to water has expanded to cover at least basic aspects of the quality of this water.
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Decoding India in Numbers  Original

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By Pushpesh Pant, Rukmini Shrinivasan
| The New Indian Express Verified
Express News Service There was a time––it now appears to be the pre-historic period–– when people talked of literacy and were concerned about illiteracy. Then dawned the era when numeracy or the ability to grasp and manipulate numbers became important. Facts were what numbers supported. Not that some wise people were not aware of how reality could be misrepresented by skilful sleight of hand with numbers. As the adage has it, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.
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Is India’s GDP calculation now a statistical sleight of hand?

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| qz.com
The GDP is perhaps the most sacred number produced by a country’s statistical system. It is supposed to be the summary of all that an economy produces, and in India, the Central Statistical Office is in charge of computing it, using established methodology. In 2015, the National Statistical Commission (NSC) approved a big change in how India would calculate its GDP, moving to the use of Gross Value Added (GVA) at basic prices.
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India’s syndemic of tuberculosis and COVID-19

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan, Saurabh Rane
| bmj.com
India’s syndemic of tuberculosis and COVID-19 Rukmini Shrinivasan1, Saurabh Rane2, http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3667-4536Madhukar Pai3 1Independent Data Journalist, Chennai, India 2Survivors Against Tuberculosis, Mumbai, India 3Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics & McGill International TB Centre, McGill University, Montreal, Québec, Canada Correspondence to Dr Madhukar Pai; madhukar.pai{at}mcgill.ca Statistics from Altmetric.com tuberculosis public health Before COVID-19 became a...
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Thread by @Rukmini on Thread Reader App

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| threadreaderapp.com
Thread: Today I am reporting official all-cause mortality from the state of Madhya Pradesh - with 84.5 million people, it is India’s 5th most populous state. It was also India’s fifth poorest state as of 2020. It is predominantly rural, with just 29% of its population in cities.
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Bright spots: Is India doing better than ever on many key indicators?

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| The Economic Times Verified
Home MarketsNewsIndustryRISEPoliticsWealthMF TechJobsOpinionBlogsNRIPanacheMultimediaET NOW AgricultureFinanceForeign TradeIndicatorsInfrastructurePolicy Business News›News›Economy›Indicators›Bright spots: Is India doing better than ever on many key indicators? 12,226.65-55.55 Incidents of violent crimes have been falling for some years across India, according to data as of 2017. The murder rate is lower than it has been in over 50 years.
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Enter the Smog: As smog descends on Indian cities, see what the data really says - ET HealthWorld

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| The Economic Times Verified
Is Delhi truly the epicentre of India’s air quality crisis? Is the air in other cities in the central-north region just as bad? Are there southern cities with equally bad air quality? As smog descends on Indian cities, we try to see what the data really says.
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Enter the Smog: As smog descends on Indian cities, see what the data really says

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| The Economic Times Verified
Between Nov 5, 2018, and Nov 5, 2019, 9 of 10 pollution watch stations that recorded the worst air quality were in Delhi. The first station outside the central-north belt to show up on the list was in Kolkata, at 48th spot, and the first southern ... Nov 09, 2019, 08.32 PM IST AFP Most cities score poorly on the air quality index (AQI). The only difference is that the number of hazardous days are lower when Wazirpur, Delhi compared with Delhi.
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How India moves: Answers from the Census 2011 data released recently

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| The Economic Times Verified
Which are India’s most diverse cities? Which place attracts the most migrants and job-seekers? Which city is the most cosmopolitan? Here are some answers from the Census 2011 Aug 03, 2019, 10.08 PM IST Agencies Delhi and Mumbai are far ahead of the other big cities in the sheer scale of inter-state migrants they attract. Chalo Delhi, Chalo Mumbai Where do migrants to Delhi and Mumbai come from? There is, understandably, a proximity effect on inter-state migration.
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Is India really getting hotter, given the mercury is touching new highs in different regions?

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| The Economic Times Verified
Home MarketsNewsIndustryRISEPoliticsWealthMFTechJobs OpinionBlogsNRIPanacheMultimediaET NOW Business News›News›Politics and Nation›Is India really getting hotter, given the mercury is touching new highs in different regions? 11,724.10-107.65 While 2019 is not our hottest summer yet, according to data that is in, the country is indeed getting steadily warmer. Jun 22, 2019, 11.30 PM IST BCCL 2019 will be characterised by the intensity of heat waves* India exprienced.
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Beneath the wave: Result data shows historic changes

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan, Et Contributors
| The Economic Times Verified
A deep dive into the result data shows that while little seemingly changed at the aggregate level, there have been some historic changes between the lines May 25, 2019, 11.00 PM IST BCCL Congress party logo (L) and BJP logo (R). Is there a story beyond the BJP’s second Lok Sabha sweep or is it just a Modi wave that has flattened all previous poll patterns?
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An Upper Hand: A look at the incomes of India's upper castes

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| The Economic Times Verified
Home MarketsNewsIndustryRISEPoliticsWealthMFTech JobsOpinionBlogsNRIPanacheMultimediaET NOW Uttar PradeshMaharashtraWest BengalBiharTamil NaduIndia Business News›News›Elections›Lok Sabha›India›An Upper Hand: A look at the incomes of India's upper castes 11,278.90-22.9 First is the BJP’s promise to implement a 10% quota for the poor and second is the Samajwadi Party’s promise to impose an extra 2% tax on the richest, who, it says, are uniformly upper caste.
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Polls 2019: A view on 15 Muslim-majority Lok Sabha constituencies

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| The Economic Times Verified
Rahul Gandhi’s decision to contest the Lok Sabha polls from Wayanad, along with Amethi, and PM Narendra Modi’s jibe that the Congress chief has been “forced” to contest from a seat where “the majority is in a minority” have revived the debate about Muslim voters and representatives in the country. But what happens when Muslims are nominated? In 2014, BJP’s all Muslim candidates lost.
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Income boost for farmers in Interim Budget: Who will be the beneficiaries & how much will it cost the exchequer?

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan, Et Contributors
| The Economic Times Verified
Promise of a minimum income guarantee to the poor has revived discussions over providing Indians with Universal Basic Income. Income support for farmers announced in the Interim Budget and opposition Congress’ promise of a minimum income guarantee to the poor if voted to power has revived discussions over providing Indians with Universal Basic Income.
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Pratham 2018 report: How much children are actually learning in schools

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| The Economic Times Verified
Private schools perform substantially better than government schools. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) for 2018 was released by NGO Pratham this month. The study has become the standard for understanding how much children are actually learning in school. The state with best age-appropriate reading skills (children in Class 3 who can read a Class 2 text) is Kerala. But the “worst state” is likely to cause some row.
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Did NOTA play a decisive role in the recent assembly elections?

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| The Economic Times Verified
Did NOTA play a decisive role in the recent assembly elections? What were the other discernible trends when voters recorded their mandate in Rajasthan , Madhya Pradesh , Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram ? The Curious Case of Madhya Pradesh elections Flips & Misses of Congress & BJP So is this a semi-final for LS polls? Post-2009, Congress has been able to flip just five states while losing four states.
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The Big Draw: Indian tourism in numbers

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| The Economic Times Verified
The Statue of Unity , inaugurated on October 31, has reportedly been getting several visitors. While the statue might be a crowd-puller, will it change the tourism dynamics of the country? Here is an overview of the latest tourist numbers:*Visitors to Archaeological Survey of India-protected monuments
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The Big Draw: Indian tourism in numbers

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| Breakingnews Travel
The Statue of Unity, on October 31 inaugurated, has been getting several visitors reportedly. As the statue can be a crowd-puller, does it change the tourism dynamics of the national country?
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What crime stats don’t say

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| The Economic Times Verified
Does higher reporting of crimes mean crime is increasing or more reporting is happening? We grapple with this question every year when annual statistics show a hike in crimes, especially against women. But new evidence suggest the overall trend is positive In 2016, 29 lakh FIRs were registered in India. Delhi and Kerala — among the most literate states — had the highest crime rate Crimes against women contribute to about 10% of all crimes.
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2020 will see 60 million Chinese graduates as against India’s 24 million

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| The Times of India Verified
NEW DELHI: India and China will between them have 40% of the world’s university graduates by the end of this decade, new estimates released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) show. However, most of the growth between now and 2020 will be in China, with India’s share barely rising.
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India deadliest place in world for girl child

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| The Times of India Verified
NEW DELHI: It's official — India is the most dangerous place in the world to be a baby girl. Newly released data shows that an Indian girl child aged 1-5 years is 75% more likely to die than an Indian boy, making this the worst gender differential in child mortality for any country in the world.Infant (0-1 years) and child (1-5 years) mortality are declining in India and across the world, though not as fast as was hoped in India.
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Crime & punishment: A safety tale of two cities

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| The Hindu Verified
Around this time, six years ago, I moved to Delhi for a new job. Even in 2009, the city had a reputation for being unsafe for women.
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Redress still wrapped up in red tape

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By Rukmini Shrinivasan
| The Times of India Verified
The capital’s experience with its Right to Services Act could serve as a cautionary tale — when a law that is neither comprehensive nor tough enough gets little publicity and less supervision, the result is that very little changes.
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