Consulting · MEL · Development Economics
Pinpoint Ventures Advisory
Development economics consulting and monitoring, evaluation and learning, grounded in twenty years of field experience across South Asia.
Ideas that work.
Ten ventures in consulting, education, technology, publishing, photography, and civic life, connected by a single question: how do knowledge and story change what development practice actually does?
The playbook
How ideas become
ventures.
There is no magic. There is a loop that runs many times before anything gets a name. It looks like this.
- 01
Sense
Listen for a question that real practitioners are bumping into and nobody has framed cleanly yet. Read the complaint inside the complaint.
weeks, not quarters
- 02
Sketch
Prototype on the cheap. A paper tool, a field survey, a notebook, a script. Show it to three people who will use it and fix what they hate.
low cost, fast feedback
- 03
Stand up
Publish a public version that someone can open on a Tuesday afternoon and get value from before closing the tab. Ship, then tune.
in the wild, not in a deck
- 04
Sustain
The venture grows its own team, its own story, and its own runway. Some land with a partner organisation. Some become their own thing. A few get retired with thanks.
own legs, own shape
The ventures
Ten ventures,
one question.
Ten projects at different ages. Some run in the wild. Some are still finding their shape. Some are sketches the ink has not dried on. Together they ask how knowledge, story, and evidence can shift the practice of development, not the slide decks about it.
Active running in the wild
Civic tech · Air quality · New Delhi
JanVayu
People's air. Civic technology monitoring air quality data for public accountability. A Congress/MMS Fellowship initiative.
Open source · Civic tech · Research tools
OpenStacks for Change
A family of open-source tools for public-interest research: EquityStack, FieldStack, BiharParichay, SomePerspective, The-Real-Middle.
Growing out of the sketch, open for collaboration
Publishing · Women-led
StoryWell Books
A women-led publishing house committed to voices at the margins of Indian literary life.
Education · 5,000+ users/month
ImpactMojo
A free development education platform, co-founded with Vandana Soni. Courses, webinars, live projects, and open labs for practitioners across South Asia and beyond.
Sketching ink not dry, company welcome
Publishing · Commentary · Indian politics
Policy Grounds Press
A sharper voice on Indian policy, rights, and the things mainstream coverage quietly skips. One writer, strong opinions, written to be used.
Lab · Prototypes · Experiments
idealogworks.foo
The experimental room. Half-built tools, live prototypes, working notes that have not earned a name yet. A place for ideas to try on their shape.
Photography · Visual essays
Phototales Studio
Photographs and photo essays. Frames, sequences, and the stories that sit between them. A slower practice, shown when it is ready.
Curation · Club · Recommendations
All The Good Stuff
A small club for things worth paying attention to. Recommendations, running lists, and the kind of collection that keeps quietly growing.
Design · Tools · Craft
Make It Pop
Design notes and working tools for the other rooms in this house. The bench where the other things get their look.
Work & writing
Notes from the field
and the desk.
Essays, dispatches, and the slower work of making sense of what the data actually says. Two places the writing lives.
The Research Rundown varna.substack.com
18 Mar 2026
🌏 The Research Rundown — March 2026 Edition
Read → 1 Sep 2025🌏 The Research Rundown - August 2025 Edition (erm... in September)
Read → 24 Aug 2025Unlearning to Lead: A First Step into Politics
Read → 26 Jun 2025🌏 The Research Rundown - June 2025 Edition
Read → 28 Apr 2025🌏 The Research Rundown - April 2025 Edition
Read → 5 Jun 2024THR - June Edition
Read →Policy Grounds Press policygrounds.press
Sharper commentary on Indian policy, rights, and the things mainstream coverage quietly skips.
7 Jan 2026
The Silence of the "Vishwaguru": India's Muted Response to Trump's Venezuela Invasion
Read → 7 Jan 2026The Law That Eats Due Process: How UAPA Became India's Preferred Tool for Preventive Detention
Read → 7 Jan 2026The Genocide That Wasn't: How Indian Media Manufactured a Bangladesh Crisis
Read → 26 Dec 2025MSME Sector Under Siege: A Decade of BJP's Destruction
Read → 26 Dec 2025The Economist Who Understood: Manmohan Singh, One Year On
Read → 25 Dec 2025The Aravallis Are Dying: How India's Oldest Mountains Became a Definitional Casualty
Read →Notes
Stuck to the wall
for now.
Short working notes on measurement, field practice, and what the data actually says once you sit with it.
A number that's easy to count is not the same as a thing that's worth knowing. Half of good MEL is refusing the first question and asking the better one.
Free platforms beat paid ones on reach, paid ones beat free on focus. The useful question is which one a practitioner will actually open on a Tuesday afternoon.
The farmer with the most grievances is usually the one with the fewest ways to be heard. If your sampling frame is polite, you have the wrong frame.
If a report needs a glossary, the glossary is where the reader gives up. Write the glossary first, then don't use any of the words in it.
A civic tool is only as good as its refusal. The question is not what you can show, but what you will not build even when you could.
The voices at the margin are not there because they are quieter. They are there because the rooms are built small. Make the room bigger.
An RCT is a photograph. A good photograph tells you something, but you can't drive on it, cook with it, or send a child to school on it.
If a training does not change what a participant does on the following Monday, it was a performance, not a training.
About
Who is behind
the work.
Varna Sri Raman is a development economist and licensed social justice worker based in New Delhi. Her work across the past twenty years has moved through programme design, research operations, behaviour change, human-centred service design, evidence building, and knowledge management, at Sesame Workshop India, BBC Media Action, Verian Group, American India Foundation, Evidence Action, Oxfam India, Girl Effect, and the Gates Foundation.
She holds a PhD in Development Studies, is a Dr. Manmohan Singh Fellow, and is both an LFA Fellow and a Studio Fellow at Terra.do.
Her first novel, The Very Last Superhero, a dystopian story about climate futures, is a bestseller on Amazon.in. She is now writing two non-fiction books. The Measurement Trap traces the history of welfare measurement in India. The Hate Effect reads the history of communal politics in India through a political economy lens.
Off the clock, she is wife, daughter, and sister inside a loud, loving family, mum to two sons, and keeper of one dog and one cat. In her free time, howling at the moon. A peaceful bibliophile until confronted by a fascist.
Collaborate
Bring a question,
not a brief.
Conversations about MEL consulting, research partnerships, civic technology, and development education are open. The work tends to start with a question no one has framed well yet and ends with something that can actually be used in the field.
If that sounds like what you are trying to do, write in. A short note about what you are working on is enough to begin.