num_pages: 324
description: How do you see India?Fuelled by a surge of migration to cities the country's growth appears to be defined by urbanisation and by its growing prosperous middle class. It is also defined by progressive and liberal young Indians who vote beyond the constraints of identity and paradoxically by an unchecked population explosion and rising crimes against women. Is it though?In 2020 the annual population growth was down to under 1 per cent. Only thirty-one of hundred Indians live in a city today and just 5 per cent live outside the city of their birth.As recently as 2016 only 4 per cent of young married respondents in a survey said their spouse belonged to a different caste group. Over 45 per cent of voters said in a pre-2014 election survey that it was important to them that a candidate of their own caste wins elections in their constituency. A large share of reported sexual assaults across India are actually consensual relationships criminalised by parents. And staggeringly spending more than Rs 8500 a month puts you in the top 5 per cent of urban India.In Whole Numbers and Half Truths data-journalism pioneer Rukmini S. draws on nearly two decades of on-ground reporting experience to piece together a picture that looks nothing like the one you might expect. There is a mountain of data available on India but it remains opaque hard to access and harder yet to read and it does not inform public conversation. Rukmini marshals this informationsome of it never before reportedalongside probing interviews with experts and ordinary citizens to see what the numbers can tell us about India. As she interrogates how data works and how the push and pull of social and political forces affect it she creates a blueprint to understand the changes of the last few years and the ones to comea toolkit for India.This is a timely and wholly original intervention in the conversation on data and with it India.
language: English
title: Whole Numbers and Half Truths
publisher: Context