Whole Numbers and Half Truths

- Official statistics often misreport non-criminal activity as crime, intentionally use wrong sections of the law to book some crimes, and significantly undercount a vast range of typically non-violent crime. - most people know little about the NCRB’s processes and methodology. For instance, the NCRB follows a system known as the ‘principal offence rule’. Instead of all the Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections involved in an alleged crime making it to the statistics, the NCRB only picks the ‘most heinous’ crime from each FIR for their statistics. I stumbled upon this then unknown fact in an off-the-record conversation with an NCRB statistician in the months after the deadly sexual assault of a physiotherapy student in Delhi in September 2012. In the course of that conversation, I learnt that the crime that shook the country would have only made it to the NCRB statistics as a murder, and not as a sexual assault, because murder carries the maximum penalty. This, I was told, was to prevent the crime statistics from being ‘artificially inflated’. - the omission of that data in the report led to an outcry in the media about its ‘suppression’ by the new Modi government. But the fact is that for the NCRB to be able to put data out, an IPC section needs to exist. Just two months later, the government told Parliament that IPC sections on murder were the only legal tools available against mob lynchings. The NCRB cannot be the magic wand that makes data appear; the hard advocacy and political work to create the legal framework for that data needs to happen first. - In 2019, the highest crime rates in India were in the two most developed states — Delhi and Kerala. The rates of recorded crime in most other Indian cities and states, quite frankly, defy belief. Uttar Pradesh with over 200 million people recorded just over 10,000 cases of ‘grievous hurt’ in 2014, while London with under 9 million people recorded over 70,000 cases of ‘assault with injury offences’, according to its police statistics for 2014-15. - For anyone looking at crime statistics of the time, as I was for what began as unrelated research on sexual assault FIRs in Mumbai, it would have seemed as if the city was awash with incidents of poisoning, mostly committed by Muslims, and the courts were failing victims. What would have remained hidden between the lines is that forming any assessment of India from police reports or from media reports of them is an exercise in futility—or worse, in deception. - observed association between income disparity and crime applies only to states in which full registration is the norm, and that is almost certainly not the case for most Indian states. Yet, the vast majority of academic work on crime in India attempts to correlate socio-economic variables like levels of urbanisation, poverty and inequality with the rate of reported crime, unmindful of the factors that affect the reporting of crime. - Some conscious strategies can improve the rates of reporting. When female political representation rises, crimes against women rise in officially recorded statistics, through better reporting. The opening of all-women police stations increased reported crime against women by 22 per cent. - Among the most popular narratives about India is this one: despite poverty and apparent conservatism, Indians are at their core liberal and secular in their values, and it is political parties who appeal to their base instincts and trap them into narrow identities. Yet, for decades now, data has been telling us a markedly different story about the deepest—and darkest—thoughts of Indians. - Indian respondents had an even lower regard than Pakistani respondents for civil rights that protect people’s liberty against oppression as being an essential part of a democracy. Indian respondents expressed greater support for a ‘strong leader’ and for army rule than most other countries and the global average. The share of Indians who thought that a strong leader was ‘very good’ for the country was higher than in any other country—even Russia. - India ranks poorly on relative commitment to democratic principles on other international opinion polls. In a 2015 Pew Research Center global survey, the importance that the sample of Indians gave to freedom of expression was lower than all the surveyed countries but Indonesia; by 2019, the share of Indians who said that it was very important that people could say what they want without government censorship was the lowest in the world, lower even than Indonesia, and lower than in 2015. - In a 2019 Pew survey, a median of 64 per cent across the nations surveyed believed that political elites were out of touch, disagreeing with the statement, ‘Most elected officials care what people like me think’. This opinion was particularly widespread in Europe where a median of 69 per cent expressed this view. Seventy-one per cent shared this opinion in the US. In contrast, just 31 per cent in India felt this way. Indians were also particularly likely to agree the State is run for the benefit of everyone. Most Indian respondents believed that voting gave people like them some say about how the government runs things. Indians in 2019 were among the most satisfied in the world with how democracy in their country was working. - One beloved narrative about India is that while political parties might trade in the business of communal polarisation for votes, the average Indian is actually a liberal person who looks forward to his colleague’s invitation for a home-cooked Eid feast and brings celebratory sweets to the office for Diwali, as the stereotype from innumerable Indian advertisements indicates. The truth is more complicated. Not every Indian might want their religion imposed on the whole country, but that doesn’t mean they want to be friends with people from other religions, let alone accept them as part of their community or family. - In a large national survey, 85 per cent of people said that marriage between two people of different religions was not acceptable. Young people in their late teens and early twenties were even more likely than older people to say that inter-religious marriage was unacceptable, and neither income nor education made people more likely to accept inter-religious marriage. A majority among both Muslims and Hindus supported action against religious conversion. Preventing inter-religious marriages animates far more Indians than is commonly believed. - In the four-state survey mentioned earlier, people from India’s historically privileged upper castes were most likely to say that the relative lack of educational and income attainments of those from SC or Dalit and ST or Adivasi groups was a ‘lack of effort’, while backward groups—OBCs, who find themselves placed in between the ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ castes on the traditional hierarchy, Dalits and Adivasis—saw it as a result of unfair treatment - Even now, outright untouchability is rife. In a large national survey in 2011-12, 30 per cent of rural households reported practising untouchability, while in urban areas, the corresponding figure was lower at 20 per cent. The practice of untouchability was most common among Brahmins (the priestly caste group that historically formed the apex of the hierarchy), with 52 per cent of them accepting that they followed this practice, followed by OBCs. - Households with better-educated adults were less likely to practise untouchability, but higher income levels were associated with more untouchability. The practice was more prevalent among households in the central, northern and hill regions, and less common in the south, east and west. - A majority of both men and women agreed that a husband has the right to ‘discipline’ his wife. Even among young people, a majority said that they concurred with the statement that wives should always listen to their husbands. Two-fifths of the youth were also in agreement with the proposition that it is not right for women to do paid work outside the house after marriage. A fairly high proportion of young women respondents held such conservative views; about one in every three young women was of the opinion that women should not work after marriage and over two out of every five favoured the idea of an obedient wife. - as with the rest of the world, young Indians could be getting more liberal on what people should be able to do in their personal lives. Between 1990 and 2014, the share of Indian respondents who believed that ‘homosexuality is never justifiable’ fell from 89 per cent to 24 per cent, from an overwhelming majority to a clear minority. By 2014, 30 per cent of Indian respondents were broadly supportive of homosexuality (the rest ranged from somewhat opposed to completely opposed), which placed India towards the liberal top of the distribution of sixty countries. - Far fewer people admit to racist beliefs in the US than those who admit to casteist attitudes in India. Decades of civil rights movements and advocacy have created an atmosphere in the US where racial prejudice has by no means disappeared, but to publicly admit to racist attitudes is no longer acceptable. In India, in contrast, this momentum has not yet built; near-majorities of people in two polled states felt comfortable advocating for laws against inter-caste marriage eighty-five years after B.R. Ambedkar said, ‘The real remedy for breaking Caste is inter-marriage. Nothing else will serve as the solvent of Caste.’ - Two out of three registered voters voted in the last national elections. Given that developing countries tend to have a lower voter turnout than developed countries, voter turnout in India has been reasonably high, and in 2019, was at its highest-ever level. For context, the United States recorded its highest-ever turnout in November 2020, and that was an estimated 66.7 per cent, roughly the same as in India. - between 1999 and 2019, men and women were added to India’s electoral rolls at the same pace. Yet, over the last twenty years, the number of female voters has grown by over 75 per cent, while the number of male voters has grown by just over 50 per cent. Women, quite simply, are turning out to vote in unprecedented numbers. - Being out of town on polling day has systematically been the single biggest reason why those who do not vote miss out, post-election surveys show. - Before even starting on this path, however, one must accept that Indians care about ideas; ideas, in fact, are what elections in India are fought over, and dismissing them by saying that elections are fought over money, identity or ‘development’ alone is to miss the point entirely. - in the rest of the country, the odds of getting elected decline sharply for a Muslim hopeful; if a constituency had fewer than 20 per cent Muslims, the odds of a Muslim winning went down to under one in a hundred in 2019. - The political ghettoisation of Muslims has only got worse since the BJP came to power; the party had no Muslim MPs in 2014 or 2019, and in Bihar’s 2020 elections, no Muslim MLA made it to the treasury benches despite the state having a Muslim population of 17 per cent. In the 2017 Uttar Pradesh assembly election, the BJP did not give a single ticket to the community in a state where one of every five people was Muslim. - These are the sorts of calculations that lead commentators to describe Muslims as a ‘vote-bank’, or a bloc of loyal voters. But if there is a truly loyal vote-bank in India, it is the BJP’s upper-caste Hindu vote-bank. The BJP is no longer a party that derives most of its support from upper castes; it is now a broad-based Hindu party, preferred over the Congress by Other Backward Classes (OBC) and Scheduled Caste (SC) voters by a significant margin. But the commitment of upper-caste voters to the BJP is near-universal, - In the 2014 election, the BJP won its highest ever vote-share among Dalits, India’s most marginalised caste group with the most adverse development indicators—the first time in an election that more Dalits voted for the BJP than they did for the Congress. - There is some evidence of what political workers and analysts take as understood in India—communal violence benefits the BJP electorally. Two pieces of recent research have suggested that riots raise the vote-share of the BJP in the subsequent election. - Despite the remaining 412 seats being technically open to candidates of all castes, both the BJP and the Congress have systematically given fewer and fewer tickets to SCs and STs in these ‘general’ seats, thereby ghettoising them into reserved seats only. In 2014, just one Dalit MP won from a non-reserved constituency. In 2019, the ghettoisation was complete; Dalit MPs won from SC-reserved constituencies only, the boundaries to socio-political mobility drawn tight. - SCs are a minority in all SC-reserved seats. This, in turn, has a real impact on the ability of SC politicians to deliver development gains to SC voters. - in the 2016 Tamil Nadu assembly election, the AIADMK’s winning margin was made up almost exclusively of women. During the campaign for the general elections, Naveen Patnaik, leader of the Biju Janata Dal in Odisha, announced that he would give 33 per cent of party tickets to women. Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, which has historically fielded a higher share of women candidates than most other major parties, followed suit by declaring that 41 per cent of its candidates were women. - voters typically tend to give state governments more credit for flagship Union government welfare schemes. In West Bengal, for instance, welfare schemes might have worked in the eyes of female voters, but these were schemes run by and credited to the state government rather than the Central government. - when asked after the 2014 elections what the first priority of the new government should be, one of the issues slightly more important to first-time voters (under the age of twenty) than to older voters was ‘protecting the interests of the Hindu community’. - Following the 2014 elections, 20 per cent of people said that they had benefited from the UPA’s Mahatma Gandhi National Employment Guarantee Scheme, but over two out of three credited the local or state government for it. Over 20 per cent benefited from the National Rural Health Mission, but over half of them credited the state government for it. Modi’s relentless personal messaging around schemes is, however, trying to fix this problem in his favour: in 2014, compared to earlier elections, voters were more likely to give credit to the Union government for welfare schemes, as opposed to state governments or local politicians. - At the height of the 2014 election campaign, between 1 March and 11 May, Modi got more airtime during the 8–10 p.m. slot on a sample of Hindi and English news channels than the next nine top leaders put together. In all, Modi was discussed for over a third of the time. 55 The coverage of the BJP also exceeded that of the Congress by over ten percentage points. This was an unprecedented gap. In 2009, the difference was not more than a percentage point or two. It is unclear whether the coverage of Modi and the BJP in 2014 was positive or negative, since the study of viewership did not carry out a sentiment analysis - What likely kept the process relatively non-partisan was not the absence of politicians, but the presence of multiple politicians representing multiple groups and parties. - A more honest assessment of Indian voting is probably this: Indian voters care about ideas, they are more ideologically committed than ever before, they care about people who embody some of these ideas. There is no doubt that they want material improvements in their lives, but the ideological signalling—whether overt or implied—by the leaders and parties they vote for and the ones they hope to defeat matters and is something they factor in. - questions that seek to better understand the voter’s world view might be more effective than those that ask her to simply choose what she is voting for from a list of options, a strategy that almost demands virtue signalling. Random response techniques, endorsement experiments and survey experiments are other methods that surveyors can employ to reduce biases associated with the misrepresentation of data, the researchers suggested. - Despite its frequent portrayal as a vegetarian country, India is actually no more than one-quarter to one-third vegetarian. These estimates are likely to be overestimates to the extent that some households may be reluctant to report meat-eating to a surveyor, especially those from castes or groups that may feel the pressure to mask meat-eating. - Vegetarianism is more strongly associated with being upper caste and upper class in India: 79 per cent of people from the SCs and 82 per cent of those from the STs eat meat, as compared to 68 per cent among OBCs and 65 per cent—the lowest among all caste groups—among the upper castes. Just 15 per cent of the poorest fifth of Indians are vegetarian, compared to 35 per cent of the richest Indians who do not eat meat. - As Indians get richer, they consume more fruits and vegetables, but they also begin to consume far more dairy, fat and sugar than is recommended. Meanwhile, the consumption of pulses does not rise substantially among the richest 5 per cent of people, and the consumption of meat still lags behind the recommended average—even the richest Indians eat less protein than recommended. Instead, the consumption of junk food skyrockets with rising incomes. While roughly 20 per cent of rural Indians and 23 per cent of urban Indians are still undernourished, around 18 per cent are at what the government politely calls the ‘over-nourished end’. - Indians have been consuming less paan and tobacco over time (although those who do smoke are more likely to be bidi-smokers than cigarette-smokers), but they’re drinking more alcohol. In rural areas, country liquor is India’s preferred tipple, while in urban areas, it is foreign or refined liquor or wine. - This is undoubtedly still a religious country. With 84 per cent of Indians saying that religion is very important in their lives, India is far more religious than Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Israel, Latin America and the United States. Only in sub-Saharan Africa and some regions with large Muslim populations do similar or higher shares of the public say religion is very important to them. Just 3 per cent of Indian adults say religion is ‘not too’ or ‘not at all’ important in their lives. - Education levels do not seem to influence religious practice, the data suggests. - Young people are quite religious too. About 78 per cent of respondents in a youth survey reported praying quite often, 68 per cent said they went to a religious place of worship frequently, 49 per cent reported watching religious shows on television quite often, and 46 per cent often engaged in activities such as singing religious songs, bhajans or taking part in satsangs. Another 46 per cent reported keeping fasts either regularly or sometimes and, finally, 39 per cent said that they read a religious book quite often. - A number of practices cross religious lines into the broad sphere of ‘cultural beliefs’. Eight per cent of Muslims say they have prayed at a Hindu temple and 6 per cent of Hindus have prayed in a mosque. - Seventeen per cent of Hindus say that they have celebrated Christmas and an even greater share of Muslims have celebrated Diwali. - Just 6 per cent of men participate in cooking in any manner, and just 8 per cent do any house cleaning. - India’s idea of holidaying too is some way from pure leisure. The average Indian household takes four overnight trips a year. Indians are social creatures, who travel largely to see family and friends (75 per cent). The next biggest category for trips in urban India is religious visits or pilgrimages. For rural India, the category is rather grim—medical visits form the bulk, demonstrating just how inadequate rural health infrastructure is. Travel for leisure is still very unusual, with about 3 per cent of the population partaking in it. - As of January 2018, 93 per cent of married Indians said that theirs was an arranged marriage. 25 Just 3 per cent had a ‘love marriage’ and another 2 per cent described theirs as a ‘love-cum-arranged marriage’, which usually indicates that the relationship was set up by the families, and then the couple fell in love and agreed to get married. There has been only very slight change over time— 94 per cent of octogenarians had an arranged marriage, and the figure remains over 90 per cent for young couples in their twenties. - Fewer than 10 per cent of urban Indians said in a 2014 survey that anyone in their family had married outside their caste and not many more outside their sub-caste (jati). Inter-caste marriage is practised slightly more among the poor than among the rich. - Inter-religious marriage was even rarer; just 5 per cent of urban respondents in the 2014 survey said that anyone in their family had married someone outside their religion. - Until early 2021, India’s Special Marriage Act, under which inter-religious marriages can be solemnised, was interpreted to require that the couple publicise their intended wedding thirty days before the date. This offered religious fundamentalists an easy route to browbeat and even physically force inter-religious couples apart. - There would appear to be little premarital sex in India; just 3 per cent of unmarried women and 11 per cent of unmarried men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four have had sex, going by what they told surveyors. Part of the explanation could certainly be the stigma of admitting to sexual relationships to an unknown surveyor, but in part it could also be the firm grip of the family—65 per cent of fifteen to thirty-four-year-olds live with their parents and another 31 per cent live with their spouses. The common perception of millennials’ lives may be of those who share an apartment or live as paying guests, but just 4 per cent live either with a friend, in a hostel, or alone. - Consanguineous marriages, or the practice of marrying a cousin or relative—more prevalent in the south than the north—is becoming less common, but over 20 per cent in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka still marry relatives. - Forty-one per cent of women had no say in their marriage and just 18 per cent knew their husbands before marriage—a statistic that has not improved. - in the bride-wanted ads, the probability of being contacted was the same for a man from the same caste and no education as that for a man from a different caste with a master’s degree. Men were willing to sacrifice three shades of skin tone to marry someone within their caste. A woman from a given caste would be as likely to contact a man from her own caste with a given predicted income level than a man from a different caste who was predicted to earn 50 per cent more. - Dowry, or bride price, was still rampant, and families paid an average of Rs 30,000 in cash, in addition to 40 per cent giving large gifts like cars and two-wheelers. The practice of giving large items as dowry was most common among upper-caste Hindus and least prevalent among Muslims. - Less than 20 per cent of women have their names on their house’s papers, just half have their names on a bank account, and just 10 per cent could take primary purchase decisions for the house. A study in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh found that just one in ten women whose parents owned agricultural land inherited any, nearly ten years after the Hindu Succession Act was amended to give sons and daughters equal inheritance rights. - Just 4 per cent of Indians currently pay income tax. Just forty lakh people in the entire country report a taxable salary of more than Rs 10 lakh a year. Surely this means the country is rife with tax evaders and household surveys are more reliable? - If India were to be divided into five classes of equal sizes, the poorest quintile (20 per cent) would make between Rs 1,000 and Rs 33,000 annually as a household, and the next 20 per cent would make between Rs 33,001 and Rs 55,640 annually. Families that earn between Rs 55,000 and Rs 88,800 annually would be in the third class and fall in the middle of India’s income distribution. The richest 20 per cent would make over Rs 1.5 lakh per year. On a per capita basis, only the top 2 per cent of the country would have a household income of over Rs 8 lakh. - Access to salaried income is one of the primary axes that circumscribes Indian households. Families in which at least one adult has a job with a monthly salary are considerably better off than households that rely solely on farming, petty business or casual daily labour. - Another key axis that divides households into rich and poor is, relatedly, education. Individuals with higher education are more likely to obtain salaried jobs than others, resulting in higher incomes in households with educated adults. The median income of households with at least one college graduate is more than four times the median income of illiterate households. - SCs and STs in India earn the least, followed by Muslims and then OBCs. Forward castes are the richest, with a household income nearly one-and-a-half times the Indian average. - In 2011, a government committee—the Suresh Tendulkar committee—used a new methodology to draw up a poverty line by calculating the amount of money a person needs to spend to buy a slightly bigger basket of goods and services, including food, education, health, electricity and transport. This the committee worked out to be Rs 27.20 per person per day in rural areas and Rs 33.30 in urban areas. By calculating how many people nationally (according to the most recent NSSO spending survey) could afford to spend that much a day, the Planning Commission would produce estimates of how many people in the rural and urban parts of each state were theoretically under the poverty line. This is how the line worked on paper. But how the line was then put into practice to estimate who really is poor was even more problematic. The number of poor in each state’s rural and urban areas, as worked out in the way described above, were used as caps—the maximum number of poor the state was ‘allowed’ to have. What this meant was that each state would have to go back to its most recent BPL census, in some cases over ten years out of date, and see how many of those people it could accommodate within the number it had been told were officially poor in its state. The Union government said that these caps were to ensure that the states did not inflate their poverty figures to attract more Union grants. But once a state hit its quota, the most marginalised of its citizens were left out in the cold. This impeded the access of poor people to dozens of schemes meant for BPL persons. - The NFSA allows states to use SECC data, but relies on exclusion rather than inclusion criteria for deciding who should be considered eligible for the scheme. Households with pucca walls and roofs, government employees, high-earners, tax payers and those with significant asset ownership are automatically excluded. The criteria are quite stringent (a household with a landline phone or a two-wheeler is excluded), but states can come up with their own preferred exclusion criteria. - Schemes that target the least do the best job at actually reaching the poor, a 2005 World Bank assessment of social protection schemes in India found. India’s best chance might be to universalise schemes. Instead of relying on either outdated survey lists or large, expensive, time-consuming surveys to assess the number of people who needed pandemic assistance, for instance, offering universal support might have been the best idea. - The economist Nancy Birdsall suggests that the middle class in developing countries could include people with an income above $10 day, excluding the top 5 per cent of that country. By this definition, India—even urban India alone—has no middle class; everyone at over $10 over day is in the top 5 per cent of the country. This is a combination both of the income inequality in India and the depth of the country’s poverty. China had no middle class in 1990, but by 2005 had a small urban middle class (3 per cent of the population). South Africa (7 per cent), Russia (30 per cent) and Brazil (19 per cent) all had sizeable middle classes by 2005. - Since 2014, the project of poverty estimation has taken a firm backseat in Indian policy. Officially, there is no new consumption expenditure data since 2011-12, although an unofficial survey was conducted in 2017-18 and then withheld by the government - ‘Certainly a lot has changed. Look at me—I spend more on the internet and my phone than I spend on food. It is possible that some things like spending on health are not being properly captured. But all of this was known and we were working on fixing it. To suppress it because it shows the government in a poor light—that has never happened before.’ - the average urban Indian now spends Rs 350 every month eating out of her monthly spending budget of Rs 3,860. Parents in Dharavi, the massive slum in Mumbai, spent Rs 25–30 every day on packaged snacks for their kids, government officials told a reporter. In the slum’s unhygienic conditions, parents often saw packaged foods as clean, unadulterated, healthy options. - When people ask me about official data, the fear of most is that it is ‘fake’ or ‘fudged’—falsified. On a national scale, however, this is highly unlikely, because it would take the kind of coordinated, decentralised falsification that is unrealistic to expect. ‘I do not think faking or fudging is a problem, and I have looked at the data very closely,’ Pronab Sen, who was also India’s chief statistician at one point of time, told me. - It’s not falsification that is worrying. It’s neglect, discredit and, ultimately, dismissal. - Better household survey data is vital to tell the story that administrative data would otherwise miss. ‘Administrative data is controlled by governments. Household survey data is vital - why was a developed state doing so badly on drinking water? The answer lay on page sixty-five of NSS Report Number 584, 2018. Yes, just 14 per cent of Kerala households had piped water coming right to their house and an additional 4 per cent had piped water coming to the yard. But run your finger down the table rows and you’ll see that the majority of the state was not getting their water from hand pumps (as 88 per cent of households in Bihar were) or from public taps (as 35 per cent of households in Tamil Nadu were). They were getting it from their own private wells (71 per cent of households in Kerala). - unemployment in India is extremely low, at just a little over 5 per cent. This is because in a middle-income country, everyone looking for employment takes up some form of work, a practice that places India in the bottom third of countries in terms of unemployment rates. But this small figure hides worrying big numbers in a few different ways. The first is that it recently grew, and the government tried to hide it. The suppressed official data—the 2017-18 PLFS—showed that as the economy slowed, unemployment in India rose to an all-time high. The number itself was still low at 6 per cent, but this low number was a forty-five-year high. - In 2011, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Kerala had India’s highest graduate unemployment rates, at over 25 per cent. To compare, at its highest in 2010, the official unemployment rate for Americans with a bachelor’s degree rose to 5.1 per cent. - Things become concerning, however, when it comes to women. Just nine countries around the world, including Syria and Iraq, have a smaller proportion of working women than India, and if Bihar were a separate country, it would have the lowest share of working women in the world. - A common trope about India’s workforce is that hiring and firing is impossibly difficult on account of antiquated labour laws. The truth is that India’s workers are among the world’s most insecure and need more, not fewer protections. The most recent official data shows that over half of all those in the workforce are self-employed, another quarter work as casual labour and the remaining are wage workers or salaried workers. The bulk of India’s workforce is engaged in the ‘informal’ sector, meaning that they have little in terms of job protection, benefits and social security. - the quality of the majority of Indian jobs is so poor that it is evident that a lack of viable options is what is keeping many working men and women ‘employed’ in these jobs. Indians are among the most overworked workers. Gambia, Mongolia, Maldives and Qatar (where a quarter of the population is Indian) are the only countries where the average worker works longer than an Indian peer. With a forty-eight-hour working week, India ranks fifth among all countries in the time spent working. - India’s minimum wages are among the lowest in the world, except for some sub-Saharan African nations. Though actual wage levels can differ from the statutory minimum wages across countries, the two tend to be closely linked, especially for blue-collar workers. - A growing proportion of jobs at Central public-sector enterprises are increasingly filled by contract workers who do not receive the benefits that permanent workers enjoy. - Government or public-sector employment also serves as a moderating influence on other forms of social inequalities that market forces exacerbate. While women earn lower salaries in both public and private sector, the ratio of female to male salaries is considerably higher in the public sector than in the private sector. Similarly, salary inequalities among various social groups are larger in the private sector than in the public sector. Regardless of the sector, forward castes have higher salaries than OBCs, Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims. But the differences in government salaries by social group are lesser in the public sector at both lower and higher skill levels. - The average woman in 1950 had more than six children, as against the average Indian woman in 2020, who will have just 2.2 children on average. - Since 1931, the first Census for which this data is available, the population growth rate of India’s Muslim minority—among whom income, health and education indicators are among India’s worst—has exceeded that of its Hindu majority. But as per the most recent 2011 Census, Muslim growth has slowed faster than Hindu growth, indicating that convergence between the two communities is on its way. - Muslim women in the southern states have a lower fertility rate than Hindus in the Gangetic-belt states; high Muslim fertility is only a problem in states with high levels of fertility for all women. - Whether population control is introduced through coercion or incentives, in patriarchal societies it leads to a worsening of the sex ratio. Areas in China that enforced fines for second births more strictly during the one-child policy regime had lower fertility but worse sex ratios than areas that enforced fines less strictly. - Over four decades separate India’s most developed states from its least developed states in terms of this fertility transition: Kerala achieved replacement fertility in 1998, while Bihar will get there only in 2039. - people from the four most populous southern states put together will account for fewer people than from Uttar Pradesh alone. These changes, the public and politicians from southern states are well aware of, come as a result of these states doing a better job of lowering fertility than their northern counterparts. And, they now feel they are being penalised for this, being made victims of their own success. - As the working-age population declines in India, supporting a dependent older population will become a growing burden on the government’s resources. Family structures will be recast and elderly persons living alone will become an increasing source of concern. - as of 2018, fewer than half used LPG for cooking, with the rest using firewood, crop residue and animal dung as fuel. Only half of rural households have a separate kitchen, and as of 2018, fewer than half used LPG for cooking, with the rest using firewood, crop residue and animal dung as fuel. Three-quarters of urban households have a separate kitchen and 87 per cent of urban households use LPG for cooking. - Despite how it may seem to those trying to buy a house at the high end of the price spectrum, the urban housing market is actually still very modest in scale. - Virtually everyone in rural India owns their house; in urban India, one in three households rents their house. - the truth is that India has been punching below its weight all this time and a question that has puzzled India-watchers is why urbanisation has not, in fact, exploded in the country. India is less urban than it is perceived to be and is urbanising slower than anticipated. India’s urbanisation rate is a little over ten percentage points lower than the rate predicted for its level of per capita income and the pace of urbanisation has been slower in India than in many other countries - In all, 455 million Indians, or over one-third of the population, could be classified as ‘migrants’. Domestic migration in India remains a story largely of proximity. Moving to another state, especially over a large distance, like from the north to the south or west, is relatively uncommon. Internal migrants seek a better life, but as close to home as possible. - Women make up 68 per cent of all migrants in India and 66 per cent of them migrate because of marriage. There are more female migrants at all geographical combinations than men, including more inter-state female migrants than male migrants. - the truth is that migration in India is an overwhelmingly female phenomenon because of the sociological nature of marriage in the country, which tends to follow the norm of caste endogamy (marrying within one’s caste) but village exogamy (marrying outside one’s village). Women make up 68 per cent of all migrants in India and 66 per cent of them migrate because of marriage. There are more female migrants at all geographical combinations than men, including more inter-state female migrants than male migrants. - The Census only asks people in a village or town if their ‘usual place of residence’—somewhere they have lived for over six months—is different from where they are now. Hence, it misses all those people who undertook a migration but then returned. - Contrary to popular belief, migrants are not the poorest Indians. Migration is in fact least common among the poorest. But short-term migrants are considerably worse off than long-term migrants; they are in cities not so much to make a better life for themselves as to survive. ‘Migration of this sort is discouragingly unpleasant,’ one survey noted, ‘but it is not financially costly.’ - Similarly, in June 2004, 566 town panchayats (small urban local bodies) in Tamil Nadu were reclassified as rural panchayats due to local resistance to urban taxation. - between 2001 and 2011, the total number of census towns and statutory towns increased from 159 to 520 in Kerala, driving it from 26 per cent urban in 2001 to 48 per cent urban in 2011. - In 2001, forty-one of every hundred Indians reported to the Census that Hindi was their mother tongue. By 2011, this was up to forty-four of every hundred Indians. - Pronab Sen agrees. He cannot picture how the 2021 Census can maintain data integrity, how its findings can be trusted, and how all the future planning and statistical exercises that it rests on can be trusted. ‘I see only one solution. Completely de-link the NPR, NRC and CAA from the Census and maintain the integrity of the Census because it is vital for India’s democratic future,’ Sen told me. - With one of the lowest levels of government spending on healthcare and one of the highest levels of out-of-pocket expenditure on health in the world, India continues to have the largest number of undernourished children, a number that grew in 2019, in a shocking reversal of decades of progress. - As states or countries grow richer, their burden of disease tends to shift from communicable diseases to non-communicable diseases, a process that is known as the epidemiological transition. India is right at the point where this change occurs. The top two causes of mortality in Indians are now non-communicable diseases, though three of the five biggest causes of mortality are still infectious diseases. - India has just six hospital beds for every 10,000 people, against the global threshold of eighteen beds for every 10,000 people. There are just twenty-eight healthcare workers for every 10,000 people, as against the global norm of forty-five healthcare workers. The average is driven up by richer states: Bihar has just one hospital bed for every 10,000 people and just four doctors for every 10,000 people. - Indians are among the shortest people in the world. For its per capita income, India has stubbornly higher than expected levels of stunting among children and adults. - The study found that on average, children in West Bengal were taller, but were also richer (average incomes were higher then in West Bengal than Bangladesh). Yet, when you compared children of similar wealth across the border, kids in Bangladesh were significantly taller. A combination of the better social status of women in Bangladesh and better sanitation (less open defecation) statistically accounted for almost all of this difference, the researchers found. - According to the 2015-16 NFHS, 48 per cent of children in India were stunted. One of the most worrying developments has been a recent increase in the levels of stunting, something that is seen rarely in the world. Between 2005-06 and 2015-16, two previous rounds of the NFHS, India made substantial progress, lowering the share of stunted children by nearly ten percentage points. However, the latest, fifth round of NFHS indicates that the last five years could have reversed many of these gains. The share of stunted, wasted and underweight children has grown in the majority of states for which data has been made available. - One case of hospitalisation alone can on average cost roughly the same as the average Indian’s consumption expenditure for the year. India’s latest push towards health insurance for the poor (the Ayushman Bharat scheme) is relatively new, and at least until now, the availability of public health insurance has not had a significant impact on out-of-pocket expenditure. - The incident led to a review which found that a substantial share of deaths of hospitalised COVID patients in Mumbai were taking place between 1 and 5 a.m., as seriously ill patients were having to remove their oxygen supply, unattended, and make their own way to the bathroom. - There is no doubt that private hospitals can be and are predatory and poorly regulated. The fear of unnecessary procedures is real: the share of babies delivered via caesarean section is far higher in private than public hospitals and in many states, at levels far in excess of even the most developed countries; by 2020, over 80 per cent of all births in private hospitals in Telangana were via C-section, as against the WHO guideline of 10–15 per cent. - The reality of how healthcare is experienced in India does not fit neatly into any of the usual Left–Right debates on healthcare. For one, the fact that private healthcare is not simply what the urban rich choose and private providers dominate rural India is rarely acknowledged. In rural India, most providers are in the private sector (86 per cent), and within the private sector, the majority are ‘informal providers’ without any formal medical training—one estimate suggests that such informal providers account for 68 per cent of the total provider population in rural India. - there is the concern that women are less likely to be accurately counted in death statistics even in ‘normal’ times. As of 2018, women made up just 40 per cent of total registered deaths and just 38 per cent of medically certified deaths. - One of the many enduring puzzles over the pandemic in India is the question of why poorer states saw relatively fewer cases and fewer deaths than richer ones. Problematic assumptions about poorer states and faulty data foundations laid the ground for a dangerous narrative during the pandemic. The go-to explanation became that poorer people and people in poorer states must have greater immunity, even though the evidence for this was wholly absent, and as past data has shown, likely untrue. - Dr Jha uses essentially this strategy in his work on mortality in India. He and his team pioneered the use of verbal autopsies, where trained investigators visit a household where a person has died, conduct an interview, and then two doctors oversee those notes to decide upon a cause of death. The Million Death Study that he led found that India vastly underestimated deaths from smoking, snakebites and malaria, among other causes. India could be similarly underestimating the number of coronavirus cases and possible deaths, - The undercounting for more developed states appeared to be lesser—could it be that all this while the states that appeared to be the worst affected were just the ones doing the best counting? - The truth, however, lies in a combination of five cardinal sins in India’s data infrastructure, failings that leave their mark on most official statistics: not collecting essential data, not collating or publishing existing data in usable ways, obfuscating or suppressing some data, overselling data well beyond what it really says and knee-jerk criticism of inconvenient data. Some of these are institutional failings and we can hope that future governments turn things around for the next pandemic. But some of these are all-new and the alarm bells are ringing loud and clear for the future of India’s data integrity.