Essays
Long-form, data-based essays on measurement, statistics and social progress—by Varna Sri Raman.
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Women and the economy
Work That Was Never Work
India now measures, to the minute, how long women spend cooking, cleaning and caring. It has measured this twice. The boundary that keeps those minutes out of the national accounts has not moved, and the measurement was never intended to move it.
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Caste and representation
Ninety-Six Years Between Counts
India stopped counting caste in 1931 and starts again in 2027. In the ninety-six years between, reservation policy for a quarter of the population rested on a number extrapolated from a colonial census, and a caste enumeration that was actually carried out in 2011 was never published.
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Poverty and prices
Where the Line Is Drawn
Six expert groups in fifty years have drawn India's poverty line, and each has produced a different number of poor people out of the same survey. The disagreements are not technical accidents. They are choices about what a person is owed, made in the language of calories.
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Poverty and prices
Eleven Years Without a Number
A consumption survey was conducted in 2017-18, approved for release, and then scrapped on grounds the ministry never specified. The next one came eleven years after the last. In between, India argued about poverty with no measurement of it at all.
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Education
Enrolled and Unable to Read
India has kept school enrolment above 95 per cent for close to twenty years. The survey that establishes this is the same one that finds fewer than half of Std V children in government schools able to read a text written for Std II. Both numbers are collected at the same doorstep, ten minutes apart.
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Statistics and the state
The Custody of 6.1 Per Cent
In January 2019 a completed, approved survey of India's labour force was not published. Four months later it was published unchanged. What happened in between is the clearest account we have of how a statistical system bends.
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Measurement
A Century of Missing Women
The Indian census has returned more men than women at every count since 1901. The decline sat in the tables for seventy years before anyone read it as an indictment, and the number that matters most is now sixteen years old.