What this is

The one that matters most for this site is This Indian Life, which is one person’s attempt to drag the most important numbers about life in India out of horrible PDFs and ancient government websites and explain them in plain language. Life in India grew straight out of it. Writing that meant years of pulling numbers out of government files, and the thing that kept nagging at me was never the number I had gone in for. It was everything else in the file — the definition doing quiet work in a footnote, the question the schedule stopped just short of asking, the table that would have changed the story if anyone had set it beside another one. This is the place for that.

So the two are sister projects and they divide the work. This Indian Life explains the numbers. This one keeps the record underneath them: where each figure came from, what its definition quietly does, who did the work, and where the counting stops.

I am not a statistician and I have no institution behind me. What I have is stubbornness, a set of rules I have written down below so you can hold me to them, and a habit of saying where everything came from. If that is not enough for a particular claim, the claim should not be on the site, and I would rather you tell me than not.

I keep walking into it. A figure that would change how you think about an entire state, sitting in table 4.2 of a PDF on a ministry site that goes down every other Tuesday. A piece of reporting from a district nobody sends reporters to, filed once, never followed up. A researcher who gave four years to a question and got one paragraph in one newspaper on a Sunday. Somebody who actually knows what they are talking about saying the true thing at minute sixty-three of a podcast, where it will die.

None of this is a failure of research. India is researched, patiently and well, by more people than you would guess. It is a failure of assembly, and of attention. That is a much smaller problem, and it is one that one person with enough stubbornness can actually work on.

A dossier here is an ongoing document. It opens when there is enough to say and after that it is never finished, only more or less current. When a new survey lands, it changes. When somebody publishes the paper that knocks out half of it, it says so, and says what it used to say, and when it changed and why. Every part of it carries its own date and version. You can watch the record think.

The point is not to be first. The point is to still be right in four years, and to show my working while I get there.

Everything here rests on somebody else’s labour: a reporter who went to the district, a researcher who gave years to one question, an archivist who scanned the thing, someone who sat down and made a podcast nobody paid them for. They get their names on it. Not a bare link in a footnote at the bottom — the name, the outlet, the date, and the way back to the original, sitting right where you are reading.

So I quote a little and link a lot. Where a snippet genuinely earns its place it goes in with quotation marks and a citation, kept to what fair dealing allows and no further. Where it does not, I summarise and send you away: go and read the paper, watch the video, listen to the whole episode. The original is better than my summary and it always will be. If your work is on this site and you want it handled differently, or taken down, write to me and I will fix it.

The attribution rules, written down so you can hold me to them. A quotation runs to what is needed to make the point and stops; where the point needs more than that, it is summarised in my words and you are pointed at the original. Nothing is republished whole. No paywalled text is lifted past what fair dealing allows. Every figure names the publication it came out of and the table it sat in, so you can go and check that I read it correctly. If I got it wrong, the correction goes on the page, dated, with the old wording still legible underneath.

Corrections and takedowns go to bhuvan@bebhuvan.com, and I would rather have the complaint than the traffic.

This is also not the only thing I keep. There is This Indian Life, and six other sites further down this page, all of which I would like to still be standing in five years. Something has to give, and I would rather it were the hours than the checking.

So I use language models, and here is the part people seem to find hard to say out loud: they are better read than I will ever be. They hold more of the literature than I could hold in ten lifetimes, they do not get bored on page two hundred of a survey schedule at four in the afternoon, and on most days they are straightforwardly smarter than me. Refusing to use them would not make this record more honest. It would make it smaller, slower and worse, and it would be vanity wearing the costume of principle. With something this good sitting right there, not using it is the thing I would have to apologise for.

That is the case for them. The limit matters more.

A model may read what I have read, draft the paragraph that explains what a study does, and suggest which other subject it touches. It does not decide what is true. Mechanisms and framing may come from a model; particulars never do. Every figure, quotation, date and name on this site is checked against a source you can open yourself, and if it cannot be, it does not go up. That is why the record grows slowly, and it is the only promise here worth anything.

Every block carries how it was made: whether a model touched it, when it was generated, when a person reviewed it, and when its sources were last checked. On the page, where you can see it, rather than in my notes.

Those absences are published here as records in their own right, each one saying what it would take to fill it and who would have to go and do it. A gap only goes up if knowing the answer would change how you understand the subject. Absence is the finding.