Whole Numbers and Half Truths : What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us About Modern India/ Rukmini S.

By:

S. Rukmini

Material type: Text

TextLanguage: English Publication details: Perungudi, Kandanchavadi, Chennai : Context, an Imprint of Westland Publications Private Limited, 2021.Edition: 1st edDescription: xiv, 327 p. : ill. ; 23 cmISBN:

9789391234676
9391234674

Subject(s):

DDC classification:

23 954.0532 RUK

Contents:

1. How India Tangles with cops and courts. 2. What India thinks, Feels, and Believes. 3. How India (Really) Votes. 4. Eat, Pray, Enjoy, Love, Marry - How India Lives Life. 5. How Much Money do Indians Make? 6. How India Spends its Money. 7. How India Works. 8. How India is Growing and Ageing. 9. How India Lives and Where. 10. How India Falls Sick and Gets Better.

Summary: 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 8,500 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 information—some of it never before reported—alongside 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 come—a toolkit for India. This is a timely and wholly original intervention in the conversation on data, and with it, India.

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Holdings
Item type	Current library	Collection	Call number	Status	Notes	Date due	Barcode
General Books	CUTN Central Library History & Geography	Non-fiction	954.0532 RUK (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Available	Gratis - Azim Premji University		45510

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Previous	954.043092 DHA Your Prime Minister is dead/	954.053 AGG Narendra Modi ( Second Revised Edition) :	954.053092 GAN Amit Shah and the March of BJP /	954.0532 RUK Whole Numbers and Half Truths : What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us About Modern India/	954.08 AIY Some Contributions of South India to Indian Culture/	954.092 (Trans) RAD மகாத்மா காந்தி	954.1 BHA History of Northeast India : Recent perspective /	Next

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 8,500 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 information—some of it never before reported—alongside 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 come—a toolkit for India.

This is a timely and wholly original intervention in the conversation on data, and with it, India.

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