@Rukmini

Knowledge from data for everyone. Founder, @dataforin. Book: "Whole Numbers & Half Truths" (Westland '21).

 Chennai, India
dataforindia.com
Joined July 2011
  • Tweets25.6K
  • Following1.8K
  • Followers69.3K
728Media
Rukmini S retweeted
MSSRF
@mssrf3h
Today at 4PM! Telling India's Story Through Data | Seminar by @Rukmini, Founder, Data for India Zoom link: us06web.zoom.us/j/8915846143…

Join our Cloud HD Video Meeting

Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise cloud communications.

us06web.zoom.us
MSSRF
@mssrfOct 14
What stories can data tell us about India? Join us for a special seminar by @Rukmini S—founder of @dataforin, former National Data Editor at The Hindu and HuffPost India, and author of ‘Whole Numbers & Half Truths: What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us About Modern India’ 📅 22 October | 4 PM 📍 MSSRF, Chennai 🎟️RSVP: forms.cloud.microsoft/r/Mx7u… #DataForIndia
1
1
3
939
Rukmini S retweeted
MSSRF
@mssrfOct 14
What stories can data tell us about India? Join us for a special seminar by @Rukmini S—founder of @dataforin, former National Data Editor at The Hindu and HuffPost India, and author of ‘Whole Numbers & Half Truths: What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us About Modern India’ 📅 22 October | 4 PM 📍 MSSRF, Chennai 🎟️RSVP: forms.cloud.microsoft/r/Mx7u… #DataForIndia
1
1
3
590
Rukmini S retweeted
Milan Vaishnav@MilanVOct 14
.@Rukmini: The number of Indian women in the agricultural workforce is the highest it has been in 30 years. And for the first time, the number of men working in services has surpassed the number of men working in agriculture dataforindia.com/the-big-shi…
3
30
4
98
4,386
Civil litigation is something of a black box in terms of data analysis - we know so little about how many civil cases there are and around what, as compared to the criminal side. Our work using e-courts data attempts to bring numbers to the table.
Data For India
@dataforinOct 14
The full extent of people's interactions with the law in India can be difficult to quantify. We analysed cases disposed of across India’s subordinate courts between 2010 and 2020. These cases, heard before magistrates, civil judges, and district and sessions judges, are the first point of contact between Indians and the legal system. In all, this dataset contains 43 million records of legislation invoked in cases. While criminal cases contribute to the majority of the dataset, the data also provides valuable insights into civil litigation, which is otherwise rarely captured in Indian data. Civil statutes define people’s rights and obligations in personal or contractual relationships, and provide remedies when disputes arise. The top five civil statutes invoked in the ten-year period were the civil provisions of the Motor Vehicles Act of 1988, the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955, the Registration of Births and Deaths Act of 1969, the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act of 2005, and the Arbitration and Conciliation Act of 1996. The civil provisions of the Motor Vehicles Act are the most commonly invoked, with 1.75 million records. They cover claims over loss of life or property, vehicle damage and insurance liability. Section 166, which allows people to seek compensation after an accident, was cited 1.25 million times. The Hindu Marriage Act follows with 1.34 million records. It covers marriage, divorce and separation among Hindus, with contested divorce cited most often, followed by divorce by mutual consent. #CriminalLaw #Legal #Law #India #DataForIndia
Title: Motor vehicle claims and marriage disputes lead civil cases in India’s lower courts Sub-title: Top five most commonly invoked civil legislations (2010–2020) Explanation: A horizontal bar chart ranks the five most commonly invoked civil legislations in descending order by number of records. The civil provisions of the Motor Vehicles Act lead with 1.75 million records, followed by the Hindu Marriage Act with 1.34 million. The Registration of Births and Deaths Act accounts for 852,037 records, the Domestic Violence Act for 398,756, and the Arbitration Act for 332,338. Source: e-Courts, Development Data Lab Judicial Portal Attribution: Data For India | CC BY

ALT Title: Motor vehicle claims and marriage disputes lead civil cases in India’s lower courts Sub-title: Top five most commonly invoked civil legislations (2010–2020) Explanation: A horizontal bar chart ranks the five most commonly invoked civil legislations in descending order by number of records. The civil provisions of the Motor Vehicles Act lead with 1.75 million records, followed by the Hindu Marriage Act with 1.34 million. The Registration of Births and Deaths Act accounts for 852,037 records, the Domestic Violence Act for 398,756, and the Arbitration Act for 332,338. Source: e-Courts, Development Data Lab Judicial Portal Attribution: Data For India | CC BY

2
5
13
1,647
Nothing I have to say should be of any interest or consequence because there are enough actually useful people for that, but I will say this one thing: I want to see these vile men arrested, and these young people well again.
Aajay Jha
@Ajay_reporterOct 10
दिल्ली पुलिस कम थी क्या..? अब प्रायोजित गुंडे भी प्रदर्शनकारियों से मार पीट कर रहे हैं..वो भी लड़कियों के साथ..
4
37
199
5,877
Rukmini S retweeted
Data For India
@dataforinOct 8
🧵 Data For India was at @IndiaFOSS in Bengaluru this September! Over the two days of the conference, we spoke with over a thousand free and open source software enthusiasts about our work and making public data easier to understand and use. At our booth, @nileena_suresh and @TheDataAreClean guided visitors through hands-on activities, inviting them to make guesses about India and compare their answers with the data. The responses opened up many conversations about the gap between data being publicly available and being useful to people. #FOSS #OpenSource #DataForIndia
1
3
31
1,277
Rukmini S retweeted
Data For India
@dataforinOct 5
As incomes rise and access to education and healthcare improves, women around the world have chosen to have fewer children. India, too, has seen a stunning decline in family sizes over the last 50 years. In the early 1990s, over a quarter of Indian mothers had more than five children. By 2021, this share was down to 10%, with most mothers having two or fewer children. This shift is also reflected in the decline in India’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR), a demographic indicator that estimates the average number of children that a woman will have in her lifetime. In 1971, India’s TFR was 5.2, meaning that a woman in India was expected to have 5.2 children on average over her lifetime. India’s TFR had dropped to 1.9 by 2023. As a result of this falling fertility, large families are increasingly rare in India. Families with a larger number of children are more likely to be poorer, and mothers in these families are more likely to have lower levels of education. This suggests that as incomes continue to rise and access to education continues to grow, the share of large families will fall further. #Population #Fertility #TFR #India #DataForIndia
Title: Large families are becoming increasingly uncommon in India Sub-title: Share of mothers by the number of children they have, over time Explanation: The share of mothers with five or more children fell from 27% in 1993 to 8% in 2021, while the share with two children rose from 21% to 39%. Over the same period, the share with one child increased from 17% to 21%, the share with three children rose slightly from 20% to 22%, and the share with four children declined from 15% to 10%. The data excludes women with no children and includes sampled women ages 15–49. Source: National Family Health Survey, International Institute for Population Sciences Attribution: Data For India | CC BY

ALT Title: Large families are becoming increasingly uncommon in India Sub-title: Share of mothers by the number of children they have, over time Explanation: The share of mothers with five or more children fell from 27% in 1993 to 8% in 2021, while the share with two children rose from 21% to 39%. Over the same period, the share with one child increased from 17% to 21%, the share with three children rose slightly from 20% to 22%, and the share with four children declined from 15% to 10%. The data excludes women with no children and includes sampled women ages 15–49. Source: National Family Health Survey, International Institute for Population Sciences Attribution: Data For India | CC BY

2
8
1
37
1,828
Can't ever upload a file when working on a train without feeling like I'm in Mission Impossible, even if it's just my boring old slide deck going to a Dropbox folder.
4
1
65
3,819
Rukmini S retweeted
Data For India
@dataforinSep 30
In 1950, a child born in India could expect to live only until the age of 41. By 2024, life expectancy at birth in India had risen to 72 years. Life expectancy is the average number of years a person would live if they were exposed to the sex- and age-specific death rates prevailing at that time. This data for India and other countries comes from the World Population Prospects, 2024 Revision, published by the United Nations Population Division. Across the world, women tend to live longer than men owing to a combination of biological and social factors. Girls are more likely to survive infancy and early childhood, while men are more likely to die from accidents in young adulthood and non-communicable diseases in old age, partly because of differences in health behaviours. However, this global trend did not hold true in India in the first few decades of Independence. In the 1950s, Indian men lived longer than women. That male advantage was reversed only in the early 1980s. By 2024, a newborn girl could expect to live more than three years longer than a boy born in the same year. This female advantage is large and well established only in India’s richer states. In poorer states, it is smaller and more recent. #LifeExpectancy #Ageing #Population #India #DataForIndia
Title: The female advantage in life expectancy in India appeared only in the 1980s Sub-title: Life expectancy at birth in India by gender, 1950–2024 Explanation: Life expectancy rose substantially for both women and men, from about 41 years in 1950 to 74 years for women and 71 years for men in 2024. Men had a slightly higher life expectancy until the early 1980s, when women overtook them. The female advantage then widened, reaching more than three years by 2024. Both groups experienced a sharp temporary decline around the COVID-19 pandemic. Source: World Population Prospects, United Nations Population Division Attribution: Data For India | CC BY

ALT Title: The female advantage in life expectancy in India appeared only in the 1980s Sub-title: Life expectancy at birth in India by gender, 1950–2024 Explanation: Life expectancy rose substantially for both women and men, from about 41 years in 1950 to 74 years for women and 71 years for men in 2024. Men had a slightly higher life expectancy until the early 1980s, when women overtook them. The female advantage then widened, reaching more than three years by 2024. Both groups experienced a sharp temporary decline around the COVID-19 pandemic. Source: World Population Prospects, United Nations Population Division Attribution: Data For India | CC BY

1
8
1
23
1,328
Rukmini S retweeted
Data For India
@dataforinSep 24
We are heading to IndiaFOSS 2026 this weekend! September 26–27 at NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bengaluru. @nileena_suresh Suresh and @TheDataAreClean from Data For India will host a hands-on booth to showcase our work on “the last mile of public data”. Together, we will explore what stands between data being publicly available and being genuinely usable. Come meet us on the 1st floor! Also at IndiaFOSS, @Rukmini will speak about "Telling India’s Story Through Data" on Sunday, September 27, at 11:45 am in Hall 1. Register here: fossunited.org/indiafoss/202… #OpenData #PublicData #OpenSource #FOSS #DataForIndia
5
1
8
1,195
New on @dataforin: the conversation about India's Gen Z misses, in my view, a sense of what an unusual moment this is, demographically. This is just not, any more, a country where being young means being at the crest of a great wave. dataforindia.com/indias-gen-…

India's Gen Z is a shrinking demographic

With falling fertility, India's generational cohorts are experiencing a fundamental realignment. Younger cohorts are no longer dominant in size, and are increasingly squeezed by older cohorts.

dataforindia.com
2
7
49
2,679
more replies
By population projections, India's youth population will begin to fall in absolute numbers for the first time in its history. This is a fundamental realignment of India's population structure, the next stage after falling fertility.
2
1
3
314
All of this is profoundly different from how India has looked, historically, and what being young has meant. It should factored into our understanding of Gen Z, Gen Alpha and the generations beyond. Read more here: dataforindia.com/indias-gen-…

India's Gen Z is a shrinking demographic

With falling fertility, India's generational cohorts are experiencing a fundamental realignment. Younger cohorts are no longer dominant in size, and are increasingly squeezed by older cohorts.

dataforindia.com
1
1
517
Rukmini S retweeted
Data For India
@dataforinSep 21
Six in ten workers in India are self-employed, making up the largest category of workers. India's labour statistics define the self-employed as persons who operate their own farm or non-farm enterprise, or are engaged independently in a profession or trade on their own, or with one or a few partners in household enterprises. Unlike salaried and casual workers, the self-employed are not paid wages, but their earnings come from the profits of the enterprise. Workers with lower levels of education are much more likely to be self-employed, while those with a higher education are more likely to be in salaried work. Among workers who have a higher education, 40% are in self-employment, while nearly 60% are in salaried work. Among illiterate workers, on the other hand, 66% are self-employed while just 7% are in salaried work. Self-employed people may be own-account workers who run their own enterprise without employees, employers who run the enterprise by hiring paid employees, or unpaid helpers who work in a household enterprise for no wages. #Employment #SelfEmployment #Work #India #DataForIndia
Title: The less educated are more likely to be self-employed in India Sub-title: Type of employment, by education level (2024) Explanation: Self-employment becomes less common as education levels rise, falling from 66% among illiterate workers to 40% among workers with higher education. Salaried work shows the opposite pattern, rising from about 7% among illiterate workers to 58% among those with higher education. Casual work also declines sharply, from 28% to about 2%. Source: Periodic Labour Force Survey, National Statistics Office Attribution: Data For India | CC BY

ALT Title: The less educated are more likely to be self-employed in India Sub-title: Type of employment, by education level (2024) Explanation: Self-employment becomes less common as education levels rise, falling from 66% among illiterate workers to 40% among workers with higher education. Salaried work shows the opposite pattern, rising from about 7% among illiterate workers to 58% among those with higher education. Casual work also declines sharply, from 28% to about 2%. Source: Periodic Labour Force Survey, National Statistics Office Attribution: Data For India | CC BY

2
9
23
997
Extremely important research by my colleague Ameya Bokil. India's overall incarceration rate is low, but not when you look at specific groups.
Data For India
@dataforinSep 18
New Data Byte: One in every 250 young men in Punjab and Delhi is in prison, by Ameya Bokil The incarceration rate - the number of people in prisons for every 100,000 persons - is an important measure of a country's socio-economic environment, and criminal and justice systems. India's incarceration rate of around 40 persons in jail for every 100,000 residents is one of the lowest in the world. However national averages hide high incarceration rates among some groups in particular. The incarceration rate for men, and for young men in particular, is much higher. The incarceration rate for men aged 18-30 years is over three times the national average. It is also significantly higher in some states in particular. Punjab has India's highest incarceration rate, led to a large extent by charges under anti-narcotics laws. Young men in the 18-30 age group in Punjab and Delhi are ten times more likely to be in prison than an average person in the country. With an incarceration rate of over 400, over one in every 250 young men in these two states is in prison. For context, the United States of America, which has among the highest incarceration rates in the world, had 520 people in prison for every 100,000 residents in 2023. A large number of those in prison are undertrials. 85% of the incarcerated young men in Punjab's jails and 96% in Delhi's jails were undertrials, meaning that they were awaiting completion of their trial and had yet to be convicted of an offence. #Prison #Jail #Inmates #Law #India #DataForIndia
Title: Incarceration rate among men aged 18–30 years, 2023 Sub-title: One in every 250 young men in Punjab and Delhi is in prison Explanation: In 2023, 144 of every 100,000 men aged 18–30 in India were in prison. The rate was nearly three times as high in Punjab and Delhi, at 418 and 423 per 100,000 respectively. This means roughly one in every 250 young men in these two states was incarcerated. Source: Prison Statistics India, National Crime Records Bureau Attribution: Data For India | CC BY

ALT Title: Incarceration rate among men aged 18–30 years, 2023 Sub-title: One in every 250 young men in Punjab and Delhi is in prison Explanation: In 2023, 144 of every 100,000 men aged 18–30 in India were in prison. The rate was nearly three times as high in Punjab and Delhi, at 418 and 423 per 100,000 respectively. This means roughly one in every 250 young men in these two states was incarcerated. Source: Prison Statistics India, National Crime Records Bureau Attribution: Data For India | CC BY

23
2
93
6,621
🧵New on @dataforin: we use data to derive insights about India, but we're also big on researching and writing about these datasets for the benefit of other researchers who may want to use them. The latest in this series is our research on e-courts data dataforindia.com/e-courts-da…

Using India's e-courts data to answer questions around access to justice

The e-courts database has become an important repository of India's judicial data, and has opened up possibilities of deep empirical research. We describe the dataset, explore what can be done using...

dataforindia.com
1
5
25
2,414
more replies
However, there are significant challenges in using the data, and our legal researcher and writer Ameya Bokil both lists and explains these, as caution for others who may want to use this database dataforindia.com/e-courts-da…

Using India's e-courts data to answer questions around access to justice

The e-courts database has become an important repository of India's judicial data, and has opened up possibilities of deep empirical research. We describe the dataset, explore what can be done using...

dataforindia.com
1
1
192
We look forward to more work using e-ecourts data, but also hope that our work helps researchers be aware of the pitfalls of the data that they are getting into. Let's make this sort of research data commons as well! (Thread ends)
1
174
Load more