With population control back in the news, an important dimension to consider: smaller families in India have fewer girls livemint.com/news/india/pop…
Data on fertility, birth order and sex shows that as Indians choose to have smaller families, they are doing one of two things, or both: stopping having more kids after they have a boy, and/ or ensuring through pre-natal sex selection that they have a boy.
When state persuasion/ coercion comes into the picture, this gets exacerbated. Laws restricting electoral eligibility at the local body to those with two or fewer children lowered fertility but also worsened the sex ratio. Financial incentives for smaller families did the same.
Thread: After more than a year of work, we have now launched , a public platform that seeks to expand access to Indian data for everyone, and deepen the understanding of the country that can come from this datadataforindia.com
We take large public datasets, make them usable, derive descriptions and insights about the country from them, visualise these insights through beautiful charts, and make all of it freely available - the insights, the charts and the underlying data.
We launch with five key verticals on socio-economic issues: Population, Health, Living Conditions, Economy and Work, and a sixth that is very close to my heart: Measurement
Thread: For an article I wrote for @Article14live, @P39A_nlud gave me access to a trove of data on 88 people on death row, one-fifth of India's death row population at the time. This included demographic data & transcripts of long interviews with the prisoners and their families.
I also had access to diagnostic data on their cognitive abilities, intellectual disabilities and mental disorders - data that has never before been collected on this population, after tests that the people on death row consented to participate in.
I have a lot of thoughts, but I think that's irrelevant. What isn't is this: this information - on childhood abuse, life histories and ongoing intellectual disability and mental disorders - was never brought to the attention of the justice system during their long trials.
I'm not sure how many people realise that India - one of the countries the worst affected by covid and a tech powerhouse - has no official website for detailed covid data. A volunteer-driven crowd-sourced website has been the source for everyone (including govt at times).
There's just simply no excuse for this. People of every political stripe should be able to agree that not having a govt website for district-level, historical and downloadable covid data is just not acceptable. It wasn't ok in 2020 and it's appalling in 2021.
A story of Indian data in four acts:
Act I: hearing of the trouble people were having in accessing routine health services during the first lockdown, I looked up National Health Mission (NHM) Health Management Information System (HMIS) data and wrote this livemint.com/news/india/how…
Act II: when the next round of data came out, I found that the disruption had been even worse than we had known and wrote this in August 2020. The HMIS website then stopped publishing monthly data indiaspend.com/covid-19-disru…
Act III: in early July 2021, the data reappeared on a shiny new version of the portal. I used it to show that the NHM HMIS - which covered 2 lakh health facilities, largely rural and govt-run - data showed a big increase in mortality during the second wave indiaspend.com/covid-19/death…
Thread: last week, I reported on data from the National Health Mission's administrative data portal that showed a sharp spike in mortality in April-May 2021. This is official data from over 2 lakh health facilities, mainly rural and govt-run indiaspend.com/covid-19/death…
The report noted the increase in deaths from "fever" and "unknown causes" in particular during the second wave's surge
While the article doesn't estimate how many of these are covid deaths, it quotes @yogeshjain_CG as saying than given other public health circumstances (not monsoon months for eg) these excess deaths should be considered as missed covid.
My heart sank when I saw these numbers: new official data from the National Health Mission - compiled mainly from ANMs and PHCs ie rural areas - show a big spike in deaths recorded all-India in May 2021 indiaspend.com/covid-19/death…
The NHM captures less than a third of all deaths in India, since its focus in rural areas and govt facilities. But within this limited universe, there was a surge in deaths from "fever" and "unknown causes" in May 2021
Another worrying and upsetting chart - the rise in maternal deaths, driven by "other/ unknown causes" in May 2021