If there's one thing that the last five years have taught us, it is that international relations in the global economy are going to be hard to forecast. The shock of the pandemic may be receding, but first the tariff wars, and then the US/Israel-Iran conflict have

In economic literature, the stories of how now-rich countries developed can allow us to picture, even if not predict, how India's development might look. These are, as I said, not predictive pathways - India's manufacturing journey, for instance, is one such example of a well-marked path

In an earlier edition of this newsletter, I mentioned my colleague Nileena Suresh's striking findings on the silent growth of 'custom tailoring' as a manufacturing activity in India, particularly that over a third of the new manufacturing jobs added over the last six years were in

One of the most interesting stories in Indian demographics, and one that reminds me that my social circle is not reflective of broader Indian realities, is the age at which women have children. As I found in my work on women's age at childbirth, the median Indian woman

The big shift when it comes to drinking water in India is that most Indians now have access to safe and clean drinking water, as I found in my work for us. At the beginning of the 2000s, fewer than 80% of Indians had access to basic drinking water, while

Thanks to an unusually cool and long "winter" this year in Chennai, my thoughts have turned to air-conditioning only in March. Growing up in Pune and Mumbai, I neither had air conditioning nor knew anyon e who did, and this was not unusual but for the time and

That infancy, or the first year of life, is one of the most vulnerable periods was something that I was aware of. My own work on mortality, for example, had shown me that across all age groups, six in every 1,000 people die every year in India, but among

A point that we've made before in this newsletter is about the stagnation of manufacturing, both in terms of employment, and in terms of contribution to economic value added. But something that we've paid less attention to is where the big shift in industry actually did

When it comes to demographic trajectories and Indian states, there are some counts on which the big shifts going on there are markedly distinct. Fertility rates in Kerala fell below replacement levels (fewer than 2.1 children for every woman) in 1988, for instance, while Bihar is expected to reach

As I watched the Australian Open men's final on Sunday, it occurred to me that the only thing that I watch on the television set in my house any more is major sporting events. It's the only thing I still need a large(r) screen for

In the very first edition of this newsletter, I tried to explain why we were starting it, with these words: At Data For India, our mission is to explain India through the data. This often means looking at the newest possible data along multiple dimensions to understand the current state

One of the key reasons that Data For India exists is that it's often difficult to quickly access reliable, well-sourced data on questions that keep popping up in daily conversation. One such question is around meat-eating: before Data For India launched, I'd have a friend or

In India's employment landscape, the main big shift over time has been the move of workers away from agriculture into industry (to a lesser extent) and services (to a greater extent). This hasn't been as linear a process as the sentence suggests - the exit of

Happy new year to all readers of The Big Shift! Underpinning any change that we've tracked are the people whose hard work has transformed this country, and in whose lives and selves these big shifts are playing out. It is in looking at the trajectories of their lives

In conversations with people in the tech space, a question I often get asked is - where is the headroom? What they want to know is essentially this: where have the big shifts not happened, and where is there then the space for their products or services. One of these

I still remember seeing my father pull out his cheque book to make a major purchase in a store. Just two decades ago, 99% of the money spent every month on major retail payments was done using cheques, my colleague Abhishek Waghmare finds in his piece for us on retail

Sometimes, the best way for me to get a sense of a number is through words. If I spell out what the change in that indicator actually means, it changes the weight of what I'm seeing, in a way that numbers sometimes cannot. The big shift in infant

One of the best parts of my job is when one of my colleagues shares something interesting that they’ve found in the data, something that feels like the germ of an idea. When my colleague Nileena Suresh was working on her piece on women in manufacturing, she flagged for

Despite the fact that population growth in India has slowed, the population discussion in the country has been hijacked by the "explosion" bogey for so long that everything else - falling fertility, ageing, growing dependency - has got completely crowded out. One of the casualties of this is

The last time that The Big Shift looked at inflation, we looked at the price of onions to help convey what volatility in prices might actually feel like, even when inflation is stable over a longer term. One of the other aspects of inflation I was keen that we look

For the most part, the changes that we look at in The Big Shift are long horizon - many time-series start in the 1950s, and some projections go up to the year 2100, so that's 150 years of change that we're often looking at. This time,

The first edition of The Big Shift went out one year ago, and we wanted to use our first anniversary to do two things. The first is to thank you for coming along on this journey with us. Thanks in particular for your feedback, and do keep it coming -

Two striking charts from my colleague Abhishek Waghmare's recent work for us on factories in India have been on my mind lately as key to understanding organised manufacturing employment in India. First there's this one on how factory jobs have grown. People working in a factory

It's one of those indicators that horrifies you every time you look at it, the idea that over 22,000 women in India die as a result of complications from or during childbirth. If there was ever an indicator you'd want to see a big shift

Over the last few months, my colleagues at Data For India have been looking closely at data on India's manufacturing workforce, an area in which there is great interest both in India and globally. Being able to look so granularly at this data has allowed us to unpack

Unlike the first users of the internet in India, the vast majority of people who are now coming online are doing it via their phones. My colleague Abhishek Waghmare's work has shown us three things - the share of Indians using a mobile phone has exploded, the share

Working with statistics can often be a series of compromises, or, to put it a little more positively, a series of decisions. One such decision that is often necessary in the broader scheme of things but can be very unsatisfying at a granular level is the use of averages. When

India's low female labour force participation rate is something that we write about a fair amount, and almost every time we point out a key takeaway: women not in the workforce aren't not working - they're just working in ways that are not considered

When my colleague Abhishek Waghmare discussed data on debit card usage with me as he researched his piece on retail payments in India, something struck me that has probably also struck many of you - I can't remember the last time I went to an ATM. I also

Most editions of this newsletter talk about how far we've come, and that there's still room to grow. But once in a while I come across a data point where the size of the shift that remains to be completed takes me by surprise. India has

In her work for us on road accidents, my colleague Nileena Suresh found that the number of annual fatalities from road accidents in India is likely heavily underestimated. The impact also seems to fall disproportionately on one group of people in particular - young men. India reported 160,000 fatalities

That the garment industry - or the 'manufacture of wearing apparel' as it is quaintly called in labour statistics - is a big part of the Indian growth story is fairly well known. We know that this is an area of competition with Bangladesh and Viet Nam in

The story of Indian mortality goes, in short, like this: the death rate in India (deaths in a year relative to population) was steadily falling since the 1950s mainly as a result of better child survival, but as the country ages, the death rate has started rising again. The story

At Data For India, we try not to be normative - we tell you where India stands today, through the data, and how it has changed over time, and usually not whether that is a good or bad thing, because we don't really feel those are our calls

I've talked twice before about convergence and divergence, which is one of the key ways we think about how states are growing and progressing. If gaps are reducing and they're all coming closer to a single point, we call it convergence; whereas if the gaps, particularly

When it comes to big shifts in population, our frame of reference is often Independence or soon after. I compare life expectancy or child mortality in the 1950s or 1970s with what it is today to show what a long way we have come. But here's a big

One of the most exciting parts of working at Data For India is that we work directly with unit-level data. What this means is that we work with the (non-personally identifiable) responses of every surveyed individual in large government surveys, and not with aggregate or summarised data. The exciting part

One of the best parts of Data For India's work for me, personally, is being able to put a number and a mental map to concepts that were fuzzy until now. A great recent example of this is my colleague Abhishek Waghmare's work for us on

This is the story of not one but at least three big shifts, and also of big shifts both past and present. From the point of view of comparative demographics and economics, this should be the chart that shows how well-poised India is for the future in one key way.

Access to Indian data has improved dramatically over the years, allowing us to do the work that we do, and we're always trying to make the case that looking at Indian public data, particularly from large national surveys, is transformational. However there are a few areas where putting

Today's newsletter mistakenly used the word "malaria" for "anaemia" in three instances. We apologise for the error; this is the correct version. This is the story of what we thought the big shift was versus what it turned out to be, while looking at

The big shift in India's education story cannot just be to get kids into school - but it's unquestionably the first big one, without which little else can happen. Every part of the enrolment story that my colleague Abhishek Waghmare writes about in his piece for

Just a little over twenty years ago, pregnancy was more dangerous in India than it was in most of the rest of the world - the likelihood of an Indian woman dying in childbirth was higher than in the world on average. The last two decades have seen an incredible

Most of our work surprises readers (and sometimes surprises me too), and as we keep saying, being surprised by Indian data doesn't mean you, the reader, were wilfully oblivious, but that those whose job it was to produce, understand and communicate this data haven't been doing

For the most part, the big shifts that we look at are stories of steady improvement (as in the case of access to toilets), or sometimes of dizzying growth (as it was with the rise of UPI as a payment mode). On a few occasions, as in the case of

The extent of usage of phones and the internet by Indians is something that is usually talked of with such hyperbole, that it can be hard to spot a real big shift here any more. As we've looked at in our work on the usage of phones, the

Most big shifts that we've looked at have been a long time in the making. Access to toilets in rural India has been steadily improving over the last twenty years, for instance, while the fall in fertility rates across the country has been going on even longer. So

We've been doing some thinking lately about whether people understand data better through text or through visuals, and of course there's no one answer. It may depend upon the reader and their circumstances, on the specific point being made and so many other things. But here&

One of the big reasons that Data For India exists is because of the number of people who told us over the last few years that they did not trust data, or did not trust the way that the data was being presented. Our complete origin story is for another

The basic facts about life expectancy are staggering enough; a child born at the dawn of Indian Independence could expect to live until he was forty, and the number was even lower for girl children. It's partly why science-minded doctors find some health influencers' spiels about aiming

One essential part of looking at big shifts in India has got to be patience. We're going to have to learn to walk before we learn to run. We cannot, for instance, expect everyone to be writing code when only two in ten adults know how to use

This is one of those times where instead of a big shift, we're flagging the lack thereof. One expectation of a developing country is that as it industrialises, its economy becomes more formal, and the share of salaried jobs in the economy rises. In the last 40 years,

It's one of those things that you think you know, conceptually but it's still something of a reality check when you look at the actual numbers. Even though the conversation about Indian emigrants tends to be dominated by people of Indian origin in the United States,

One of the best parts of getting to do the work that we do at Data For India is the opportunity to, every day, update my own priors. In statistics, or, more specifically, Bayesian statistics, priors are the initial set of beliefs and assumptions about a parameter, before you see

Anyone who has looked at any good Indian data knows by now that the vast majority of the country eats meat. Nearly eight out of ten people eat some form of animal sourced protein, my colleague Nileena Suresh writes in this piece for us on meat consumption in India. Eggs

Among the biggest success stories of the last 20 years has been the huge expansion of financial inclusion. To get from fewer than half of Indian households having a bank account in 2006, as my colleague Abhishek Waghmare found looking at National Family Health Survey data, to 96% of households

The future is supposed to be, almost by definition, uncertain, but there's a certain inevitability to how demographics are going to change in India and its states for the near future - women will have fewer children and people will live longer. The population will first stabilise and

When you're looking at changes in mortality, numbers can sometimes start to feel a little zero sum. Is it a big shift, really, that people die less of one thing now and more of another, when the levels of mortality are not falling at the moment? It'

In India's internet story, one big shift is already well known - over the last decade, India has gone from having fewer than 100 million internet subscriptions to having over 900 million internet subscriptions. India's National Sample Surveys - large, representative surveys conducted at the household

To talk about women in India's labour force, as this week's newsletter does, is to necessarily start with an ugly assumption - that the women out of the labour force are not working. When enumerators canvass respondents in India's labour surveys, they first encode

In 1999, over a century after the first telephone exchanges were set up in the country, 7% of Indian households had a landline phone. By 2005, this was up to 14%. In a country where access to services usually looks like a line-graph inching forward every year, this number steadily

In an earlier edition of The Big Shift ("Rising tides"), I started by saying that "one of the big questions to ask of long-term data around Indian states is this one: is there convergence or divergence?" In that case, we were talking about fertility, where there

At the risk of giving away the ending of many future editions of The Big Shift, I can say this about most data on access to amenities in India - access is broadly improving. So too the data on access to drinking water in India is one of broad gains.

One of the big questions to ask of long-term data around Indian states is this one: is there convergence or divergence? At Independence, there were already wide variations in the levels of development of the new states of India. In the decades since, while the country as a whole has

Some stories of change in India have to be told through carefully assembled time series data; my colleagues Abhishek and Pragnya used over 15 separate surveys to stitch together this piece on how employment had changed over time, and Abhishek, along with our research team, had to create a relatively

For the most part, the big shifts in India have involved big changes in numbers - going from high infant mortality to low infant mortality, or going from low levels of electricity access to high levels of electricity access, This week's big shift is of a number that

Twenty years ago, malaria killed more Indians than diabetes, and diarrhoea killed more people than cancer. This wasn't unexpected - in 2000, India's per capita income was less than $500, which made it a low income country in the World Bank's classification of countries

Until ten years ago, if your household in India owned a vehicle, it was most likely to be a bicycle. This wasn't just the case in rural India - right up to 2012, even urban Indians were more likely to own a bicycle than they were to own

That India's population growth is slowing down finally seems to be something that everyone accepts. We also now broadly agree that the demographic mode through which this is taking place is through falling fertility - the average number of children that a woman can be expected to have

Food has for a long time defined Indian statistics and economics. Until just a decade ago, India's poverty line was based on how much a person would need to spend to be able to consume a certain minimum number of calories in a day. As a result, the

The move of a country away from agriculture has been one of the defining trajectories of global economics, politics, sociology, demography and culture. Across human history, countries have taken only slight variations of the same path - of people over time moving off the land and into cities to work

One of the most staggering aspects of data on mortality is just how risky childhood is. "Wherever you live in the world, early childhood, especially infancy (the period before a child turns one) is a time of relatively high risk compared to later in life," I wrote in

At Data For India, our mission is to explain India through the data. This often means looking at the newest possible data along multiple dimensions to understand the current state of socio-economic conditions. What this can sometimes obscure, however, is the long sweep of (recent, modern) history. Once every week,