Project
What do we do?
The project is an effort to document India, locally. We create large-scale encyclopaedias of Indian, documenting district-level cultures and statistics. In doing so, we're pioneering open, easy-to-use platform curation that turns huge amount of complex information into meaningful knowledge. We want to enable millions of people to learn about India by looking deeper, conduct their own analyses and create their own stories about India. Ultimately, we want to advance our ability to learn and better understand ourselves as communities.
We do not build large-scale theories about India. We zoom in into its towns, villages and cities and study their unique stories of culture and development.
In some ways, we try to understand India bit by bit.
We collect, synthesize and try to meaningfully represent information about Indian districts.
In doing so, we may be making errors, omitting useful or valuable information or articulating something incorrectly. Please tell us, so we can improve the information provided.
Documenting lived realities and local data of a country as vast as India, is a tall order. Hence, the project is always, ever-evolving, ever-enriching. We rely on users' contribution to help make the content more accurate and comprehensive.
We hope to cover all Indian districts over time. At this stage, we are releasing our first state, Maharashtra, which provides the framework and structure to the ambitious scale of the project.
We will welcome collaborations to achieve this exercise of documentation and curation for more effective information dissemination and nation building. If you would like to partner with us for your district(s), please do write to us.
We'd like to think we have pioneered this framework. The Portal puts your information in your hands. We provide an open, easy-to-use platform that turns information into knowledge. It allows millions of people to learn about these lands, conduct their own analyses and create their own stories about India. Ultimately, advancing society’s ability to learn and better understand itself.
Why are we doing it?
We may know a lot about India but how much do we know about it at the local level?
If you set aside a few metropolitan cities, we can’t easily find regional and local level information in India.
Does this need to be this way? Must we rely on Wikipedia’s nominal entries or Lonely Planet’s tourist-centric information to find out more about our local cultures and development?
More importantly, can we afford to not have decentralized repositories of knowledge in our ever-so-diverse country?
The British, in their colonial project, had undertaken mammoth efforts of writing district gazetteers of India, documenting every little detail about our local customs, wealth and geographies. Except in some states, this process has fallen into disrepair. In this project, we re-imagine this exercise, but by dissolving colonial frames of knowledge creation and evolve new ones that truly reflect models of self-discovery.
To develop a framework for this, we want to collect and synthesize knowledge about ourselves in our own way, the way we experience ourselves.
This curation has to be done locally. If decentralization is the future of governance, then local-level knowledges and information is a prerequisite. This website hopes to assist local administration in better policymaking, local entrepreneurs and businesses for richer market information, and a dwelling space for curious minds.
Narrating local histories and cultures will instil the much-needed pride amongst people in their own lands, regarding their heritage and traditions. Knowing local data allows innovative, customized policy solutions to be carved out.
Please also visit our Centre's website for understanding our philosophy. The Concept Note of the Project, authored in 2021, is here.
How do we do it?
For statistics (quantitative) work, we rely on data from the government, most notably Census, various surveys (NFHS, PLFS, AISHE, UDISE+, HMIS, NJDG etc.), other public datasets and district-level reports (sometimes called District Statistical Abstracts). We sieve through this vast swathe of data, often with district level officials, translate it, clean it, integrate it, and finally aggregate it develop usable spreadsheets. The data is then visualized graphically. Each of our analytics and visualization is constructed in-house, through our own engine.
For cultural (qualitative) information, we undertake fieldwork, collecting stories and narratives, often through our District Fellowship Program (school/college students who become researchers of their own districts and towns: see here). We also explore native-language texts and study archives, and old gazetteers extensively. We also try to find local intellectuals who guide us in our exploratory journeys of our lands.
Mistakes
We work with chaotic information and dirty datasets. This makes mistakes inevitable. And that's why, the project will always be in, say, beta phase.
The Website is a result of efforts of our researchers, contributors, and ordinary citizens working very hard to bring out stories from the ground and data from government sources. The task of documenting a nation like India, with enormous diversity even within its villages, is enormously ambitious. Mistakes, omissions and errors would naturally creep in. We hope the users will bring them to our attention and we will do our best to revise the content.
The Project is therefore participatory in nature. It is very easy for anyone to highlight the error and plaster it on social media. That will only dampen our enthusiasm. We're not doing this project for any profit or any other private interest. We're doing it because we like it, and we hope users will too. In the spirit of collaboration, we'd encourage users to help us improve the content rather than merely criticize it publicly. Please note that any errors one may encounter, will be errors of judgment, not intention.
In chapter under 'Cultures', you may see certain aspect not (properly) mentioned, or may carry incorrect descriptions. It may also carry only one-type of description even though many other versions/forms may exist. This is indeed possible. Right now, we have a very small team. But we will be very happy to hear from you, what all can be included. We will reserve some editorial discretion in order to ensure some quality considerations and for ensuring our overall philosophical vocabulary does not change. But by and large, we would be very happy to add new information that comes our way.
In chapters under 'Statistics', there may be errors in digitization of data, or simply inability to source the data. Please share us the authentic files and data sources for us to correct it. It is also likely that the government source also carries the same error which has crept into our Portal. This will require us to consult with the relevant government department as well. We will do it indeed, and encourage you to bring it to our attention.
In that sense, we consider the mistakes communicated to us as the keys to enhance the quality of our work and bring back the information of people of India, to people themselves.
Over time, we hope to build a community of our editors and contributors.
A Note on Project's Philosophy
While the project's philosophy is detailed in the website, at the core, we are motivated by the following four principles:
Firstly, we believe that small is beautiful (invoking E.F. Schumacher, but more importantly, Gandhian thought). We believe that decentralized, rather polycentric thinking is the desirable attitude to not only understand but also govern India. In fact, this is the primary motivation for us to go deeper into each district.
Secondly, we do not theorize. India is not a theory-based culture, rather an empirical one. For far too long people have come up with theories to fit India into and have failed. We try to document India as it is. (Surely we observe through our own lenses, but at least these are native lenses.) This also means that we regard learning-by-doing and trial-and-error as the most desirable way of knowledge creation.
Thirdly, we are doing this for ordinary Indians, not just for scholars or academics. Hence, we do not use anthropological frames, or scholarly vocabulary to write about our lands. We do not translate many native words where which do not convey experiential attribute of that action. We do not italicize native words, nor do we use, say, Hunterian transliteration.
Fourthly, despite recognizing its limitations (and even danger), we believe data is the cornerstone of policymaking and necessary for meeting developmental challenges.