VizChitra 2025

This session aims to capture the data environment in India and its nuances through a peer-learning, Birds of Feather session. The session aims to bring together practitioners, researchers and policymakers with a focus on the datasets available in the Indian context, challenges associated with these datasets and ways in which users often navigate these challenges to answer complex questions on India in a data-poor or data-scarce environment.

The session will focus on public datasets available in India, such as the Population Census (last done in 2011), Economic Census (last done in 2013), National Surveys (varying frequency, Administrative Data, etc. The session will primarily focus on questions of measurement (i.e., the purpose of the data and how indicators get measured) along with discussions around data quality, temporality, gaps, scale, and guidelines around ways in which users can use or not use such datasets. Through this discussion, we aim to also ideate around innovative solutions like the use of alternative data sources (such as satellite data, data from apps/mobile networks, etc.) or primary knowledge/ data collection and simple visualization techniques to facilitate policy formulations and planning.

India’s data ecosystem is currently under the spotlight with debates around its criticality, constant delays in releasing data, undercounting or miss-sampling to fudge numbers, and its entanglement with Indian politics. Through this session, we aim to build a constructive discussion and contribute towards this growing debate on India’s data ecosystem by looking at the current state of data in India as well as identifying a way forward to improve the data environment that helps make data more accessible and strengthen evidence-based decision-making in the Indian context

Participants will be able to develop an understanding of India’s Data Landscape along with critical data assessment and alternative methods through use cases and primary work experiences through peer-learning
Exposure to existing debates around India’s data environment ( basically - a hitchhiker’s crash course on the long contribution of journalists such as Pramit Bhattacharya and Rukmini S towards this topic)

We see our audience in two parts. The first is researchers, practitioners, policymakers, journalists, students, etc., who have hands-on experience working with public datasets in India. The second is people who are interested in gaining exposure to relevant datasets in the Indian context and learn about the data ecosystem in our country.

Yashita Singh is a researcher with the Urban Informatics lab at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bangalore for the past 2 years. Her background in urban planning instilled a passion for learning about cities and questioning the complexities around them. She uses a data-driven approach to answer questions related to economic development, climate change and migration. She uses the learnings from the practice and research to teach basic data skills and visualisation techniques at the urban fellow’s programme along with faculty at the Urban informatics lab.

Herry Gulabani is a researcher with the Urban Informatics Lab at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore. His work looks at data and quantitative methods in the context of studying India’s urbanisation trends with a focus on economic development. His current research focuses on combining secondary data with spatial data and remote sensing to fill in gaps in data-poor environments. Herry is a faculty member at the Urban Fellows Programme at IIHS and co-teaches the Data Skill Lab about basic data skills, data visualisation, and quantitative research methods. He has also taught capacity-building courses for practitioners and government officials on the same.