VizChitra 2025: India's first community-driven Data Visualization conference

{Describe your talk/session in 2-3 paragraphs}
In 2022, my colleague Kiran Pandey and I set out to build something we hadn’t seen before in India—a living, visual record of the country’s fast-changing climate. The idea became India’s Disaster Atlas, a database and dashboard that documents extreme weather events across the country (https://www.downtoearth.org.in/weather_disasters_india). But behind this neat visual tool lies a messy, fascinating process of trial and error: What counts as “extreme”? Where can we find trustworthy, granular data? And most importantly, how can we present the climate crisis in a way that makes people sit up and take notice?

After months of scouring data sources, testing formats, and debating frameworks, we hit upon a simple yet powerful unit of measurement: the number of days with extreme weather. With that clarity, the design of the dashboard fell into place. It has since become India’s most comprehensive visualisation of extreme weather—and was even cited in the 2025 Economic Survey. But the story of how we got there is as important as the final product. It’s a story of decisions, dead-ends, trade-offs—and what we learned about how to make data stick.

In this talk, I’d like to walk the audience through the journey of building a public dashboard from scratch—what we got right, what we struggled with, and what we wish we’d known at the start. From data sourcing and design thinking to audience engagement and policymaker recognition, this is a behind-the-scenes look at climate data storytelling in action.

{Mention 1-2 takeaways from your session}
A dashboard is only as powerful as the decisions behind it: metrics, formats, and context matter.

Simplicity in unit design—like counting “days with extreme events”—can transform how data is understood and used.

{Who is the audience for your talk/session?}
Journalists, data scientists, climate researchers, designers, civic tech practitioners, and anyone interested in the intersection of public data, storytelling and environmental communication.

{Add your bio, including work place name and your job role}
Hi, I’m Rajit Sengupta. I’m currently Associate Editor at Down To Earth magazine, where I also lead the Data Centre. I’ve been a journalist for over 15 years, and along the way, I’ve also trained fellow journalists and researchers in both India and Africa in how to tell better stories with data.

I work mainly on data-driven stories around the environment and development. Since 2016, I’ve been authoring State of India’s Environment in Figures—an annual book that turns government data into easy-to-understand fact sheets to highlight the key environmental issues facing the country. It comes out every year on June 5, World Environment Day.

I also co-created India’s Disaster Atlas, a dashboard that tracks extreme weather events across the country in real time. Both the book and the dashboard are efforts to make complex data meaningful—and hopefully, impossible to ignore.

I am most regular on email and on Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajitsengupta/)