Did you know most babies in India are born in the second half of the year:

And that, the temperature has a strong association with the number of conceptions?

India’s ‘public health genome’ is vast, dynamic, and sometimes chaotic — just like its genetic code. In this talk, I will present a visual journey through India’s health landscape, one base at a time, covering the “ATCGs” — Anomalies, Trajectories, Correlations, and Gographies.
Through carefully crafted charts, maps, and interactive visualizations, we’ll explore:

• Anomalies across different data sources
• Trajectories of seasonality of births across geographies; seasonality of diseases and accidents across geographies and mortality trends
• Correlations:hHow climate change likely impacts conceptions (and disease-free births); how rainfall patterns drive diseases
• Geographies: In India, any of the ATC has heterogeneity with respect to the geography - I will cover some of the statistical metrics and their visualization for quantifying the heterogeneity across states

The talk combines principles of data storytelling, aesthetics, and accessibility to create narratives that resonate emotionally and intellectually. All the analysis is based on data that is available publicly but remains largely under utilized and under visualized. A vignette of some of the figures (including the two above) is available on my blog: https://genomeofindia.substack.com/ and through the introductory course in public health informatics ‘DH302’: https://saket-choudhary.me/DH302

Key Takeaways

The talk is designed to be accessible to a wide audience. We will take a first-principles approach to understanding the state of public health in India, where we are and where we are going. Through this talk I will try to decipher the impact of climate change on public health in India. Throughout, I will rely on simple and intuitive visualization as a key tool to convey a message, not only to the policy makers, but also to us, the common Indian junta.

Audience

• Data visualization practitioners
• Public health researchers
• Journalists, designers, and analysts interested in Indian data
• Students and early-career professionals curious about using data for storytelling

Bio

I am an Assistant Professor at the Koita Centre for Digital Health at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. My research group develops novel computational methods to understand how genes are controlled and how diseases impact the state of individual cells. Recently, I have been exploring the intersection of climate change and public health. I trained as a chemical engineer before switching to (computational) biology. I write on substack and maintain a (not-so-updated) technical blog