Whole Numbers And Half Truths: What Data Can And Cannot Tell Us About Modern India | Book Spotlight: Rukmini S.

So, my background is in journalism and around the pandemic I spent some years on the field as a field reporter and then some years in data journalism looking at what good data can tell you about the country. And what I found I had reached a point where I felt that there was a story to tell about India that was a combination of what good data can tell you about the country as well as what my experiences on the field and my conversations with experts had shown me that the data either gets wrong or misses or misleads on. So, the idea of the book was to give people a snapshot of how things look in modern India, sort of trying to answer 10 big questions about how things work in India through a combination of both what the data can tell us and what the data misses.
I guess in more academic terms it was a way to bring in the quantitative and the qualitative together. 

Motivation for the book

I think there is a sense often about India that there is not good data or that good data does not cover the expanse of the country. And one of the things the book tries to answer is that data can actually give us a far more granular picture of the country than our anecdotal experiences ever can because we do all function in bubbles and one of the things that great nationally representative data can do is show you just how small that bubble is and how disconnected it is from the broader Indian reality.

Misconceptions Challenged

I encounter misconceptions on two ends of a spectrum. One end usually is that nothing has got better and everything is in terrible shape and the other end is typically everything is fantastic and you know there is nothing better that we could do. And of course, the reality and data does show this lies in the middle which is everything has got exponentially better in really moving ways when you look at the data.
I mean life really is very different for us than it was for our grandparents and this is a huge success of the modern Indian story. But everything is not equally good and not equally good for everyone. So I think what I have really learnt is that things are better than many people think they are but they are not as widely distributed or as equal for everyone as others can think they are.

The Central Argument

The argument is essentially that there is good data that can tell us a lot about the country and the reason to believe that is not because I say so, the reason to believe that is because if you look closely at Indian data, it has history, it has pedigree and it has the most important thing which is supervision. There are a lot of people looking very closely at Indian data and there is a lot to be proud about the scope and expanse of what data can capture about India. I think the price of democracy is constant vigilance and we find this when it comes to data as well.

If we want data of this quality to be able to tell us, to answer the questions that we have about the country, we are going to have to be very vigilant and we are also going to have to fight for more. So data can be a huge part of the Indian story but it takes work and it is not going to be easy.

Why does the Book matter today?
 
I think again it is sort of at two ends of the spectrum. I encounter this a lot among younger people, the sense that Indian data is truly terrible and it is all made up and it cannot tell you anything about the country and we do not really know what is going on and that is just not true to be honest and I think what has happened is that there has been a sort of broad brush criticism of Indian data in a way that has painted everything the same hue and it has made younger people think that there is no good data, that it is all made up. So I think one of the reasons the book matters is because it tries to provide a toolkit to show people how to work with data, to encourage them to engage with the questions that come out through the data but also to build a framework of how to critically engage with these data questions, to ask of the data, sort of checks to put in place. So it allows people to become active members of a democracy, actively using data to answer the questions they have about the country.

Takeaways for readers

I feel extremely optimistic about not just the direction that we are going in many respects but also the direction that Indian data is going in. I would love for people to share that optimism about what can be done with data but as I said, I do not think that being uncritical or non-skeptical is a good way to go about things either. I think what is harmful is blanket suspicion where you are just suspicious about everything without any good reason.

So I think we should be skeptical but there should be good reason for why that skepticism is there, what is there in data that is driving us to be skeptical. So I would hope for optimism with skepticism and seeing data as a powerful tool to do more and to answer the questions you have about India.