Rukmini Shrinivasan
Chennai
Knowledge from data for everyone. Founder, @dataforin. Book: "Whole Numbers & Half Truths" (Westland '21).
Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Rukmini Shrinivasan
The highs and the lows
What sort of chart do you picture when you read the words: no change over time? Me, I picture a flat, unchanging line chart. So when we decided to look at rainfall trends in India and my colleague Juhi Chatterjee came back with the finding that annual cumulative rainfall in India has not changed in any statistically significant way over time, that's the chart I pictured. Except, it actually looks like this.
The gap in life expectancy between India and the UK has halved since Independence | Data Bytes
In 1950, a child born in India could expect to live only until the age of 41, while a child born in the United Kingdom the same year could expect to live to 69 years. Life expectancy at birth is the average number of years a newborn would live if they were exposed to the sex- and age-specific death rates prevailing at that time.
Getting the ABCs right Original
The big shift in literacy in India is clear enough: rates of literacy have grown steadily over time, and gaps that once existed- between men and women, rural and urban, etc. - are converging, as my colleague Abhishek Waghmare found. Irrespective of how we measure it, the story is going to be the same. Yet, how we measure it still matters. Some measures matter because they affect what the trajectory of what we're trying to measure could look like.
Kutcha/ pucca | The Big Shift
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.
Missing millions | The Big Shift
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.
Formally stuck | The Big Shift
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.
Death, on average | The Big Shift
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.
Introducing Data Bytes: One chart about India every week
Data For India's aim is to advance the understanding of India. This means helping people find answers to the questions that they have about India, whether big or small. Much of our work involves big ideas - questions like 'What work do women in India do?' or 'How do Indians spend their money?' or 'What is going on with fertility in India?'. This work needs deep research, assembling massive datasets, and is shared on the platform as long insights with many charts.
India's dependency ratio will soon rise for the first time in 70 years | Data Bytes
The population dependency ratio is the share of those segments of the population who are dependents - children and the elderly - relative to those parts of the population who can be economically productive. A higher dependency ratio means that a country will need to spend more money on welfare measures like education, childcare, eldercare and pensions, while having a smaller base of people who can produce the wealth that is needed to fund such a safety net.
Poverty of thought | The Big Shift
Of all the big shifts that India has undergone, the decline in poverty is the most fundamental - everything else becomes moot, really, if poverty is at high levels, and most other developments go hand in hand with a decline in poverty. For something so fundamental, you'd imagine that the data is pretty straightforward. That, unfortunately, is very much not the case.
The twilight of our youth
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.
Sewing solo | The Big Shift
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.
Legal burdens | The Big Shift
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.
The Roaring Twenties | The Big Shift
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.
Full stack | The Big Shift
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.
Learning on the job Original
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.
Salary freeze | The Big Shift
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.
Cooked | The Big Shift
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.
Heating up | The Big Shift
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.
Safer times | The Big Shift
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.
Lady tailors | The Big Shift
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.
Drawn by hand | The Big Shift
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.
Open for business | The Big Shift
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.
College-goers | The Big Shift
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.
Cold comforts | The Big Shift
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.
Sickness and health | The Big Shift
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.
The Big Shift
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.
Open for business | The Big Shift
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.
Getting sick in 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.
Fuel for cooking
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.
Lady tailors
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.
The baby boom years
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.
Drawn by hand | The Big Shift
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.
Cold comforts
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.
The first days of life
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.
Brick by brick
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.
Is India's demographic dividend over?
The term 'demographic dividend' is often used to describe the unique demographic opportunities that favour India. We look at historical data as well as projections for the future for India's population by age group to consider whether India's demographic window to achieve that dividend is still open.
Age distribution in Indian states
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.
Anaemia in India
Over half of all women, and two-thirds of children under the age of five in India are anaemic. India's high rates of anaemia are something of a puzzle in global health because while many other indicators of nutritional outcomes have improved over time, India's anaemia numbers appear to have worsened. What is anaemia? Anaemia is a condition in which the blood has less haemoglobin[1] than normal which reduces the capacity of the blood to carry oxygen through the body.
Access to drinking water
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.
Mortality in India
Over the last century, life in India has got safer - a child born in India can expect to live longer than her parents and grandparents did and the risk of dying young has declined steadily. Mortality in India and the world Around 9.5 million people die in India every year. This is the second largest number of annual deaths of any country in the world after China, but that's just a function of India being the world's most populous country.
Population growth in India
With over 1.4 billion people, India now has more people than any other country.
Decoding India in Numbers Original
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.
Is India’s GDP calculation now a statistical sleight of hand?
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.
India’s syndemic of tuberculosis and COVID-19
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...
Thread by @Rukmini on Thread Reader App
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.
Bright spots: Is India doing better than ever on many key indicators?
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.
Enter the Smog: As smog descends on Indian cities, see what the data really says - ET HealthWorld
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.
Enter the Smog: As smog descends on Indian cities, see what the data really says
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.
How India moves: Answers from the Census 2011 data released recently
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.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Rukmini
Contact Rukmini, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack