Twelve 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?
On the name
A log of ideas in the works.
It is a practice, not a slogan. Ideas get written down, tried, kept, or retired. The ones that survive grow into ventures. The ones that do not still earn their keep because they feed the ones that do. Everything on this site is either an idea being logged, a venture already in the works, or notes from the bench in between.
The ventures
Twelve 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.
Consulting · MEL · Social research
A registered social research and advisory practice since 2016. MEL system design, programme evaluation, applied research, and strategic advisory for development funders, implementers, and civil society. Recent engagements include the Gates Foundation, the India Health and Climate Resilience Fund, the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture, Claylab Education, GAIN, and Populi Research Services.
Civic tech · Air quality · Indian cities
India's first citizen-led air quality testimony repository. Hyperlocal AQI data, citizen-reported pollution accounts, and policy-relevant analysis across Indian cities.
Open source · Civic tech · Research tools
A family of open-source tools for public-interest research. InsightStack for MEL and econometrics, FieldStack for field R notebooks, EquityStack for development data workflows, SignalStack as the companion knowledge base for the Research Rundown newsletter (archived issues, featured tools, method spotlights, curated resources for practitioners), plus RootStack, BridgeStack, ViewStack, and PolicyStack under the hood.
Publishing · Women-led
A women-led publishing house committed to voices at the margins of Indian literary life.
Education · 5,000+ users/month · Free
A free development education platform for practitioners across South Asia. 48 courses, 400+ handouts, 16 learning games, 19 labs, 9 premium interactive tools, a podcast, a 247-tool dataverse, a repository of 203 behaviour change techniques, and a NudgeKit.
Live projects
Publishing · Commentary · Indian politics
A sharper voice on Indian policy, rights, and the things mainstream coverage quietly skips. One writer, strong opinions, written to be used.
Newsletter · Development research · South Asia
A bi-monthly curation of development research, evidence, and sector jobs from South Asia and beyond. Lands in inboxes once every two months, for practitioners, students, and researchers who want the interesting stuff without the slog.
Civic tech · Policy tracker · South Asia
A live South Asia policy and scheme tracker. Government announcements, welfare schemes, and budget lines across the region in one searchable place, built so a practitioner can answer a question in under a minute instead of an afternoon.
Stage zero · Tech experiments
The scratchpad, not a proper venture. Small tools, proofs of concept, and side projects built to scratch an itch or test an idea before it earns a name.
Photography · Travel · Prints
Curated travel photography printed on museum-quality paper. Affordable wall art that turns a wall into a story.
Indian craft · Thoughtful gifts
Curated Indian craft and thoughtful gifts. Researched guides to craft objects and gifts built to last, from makers worth knowing about.
Digital agency · Non-profits · Social enterprises
A digital agency built for non-profits, social enterprises, and the people changing things. The in-house workshop, open to outside projects too. We make movements pop.
Ideas, tested
35 experiments in public-interest work, shuffled on each rebuild. Each has a question, a bet, and an outcome. Showing 8 of 35.
Civic tech
The bet
Government announcements, welfare schemes, and budget lines are scattered across dozens of ministry websites, PDFs, and press releases. Put them in one searchable place and practitioners will come.
What happened
PolicyDhara is a live South Asia policy and scheme tracker aggregating government schemes, budgets, and announcements across the region in one searchable interface.
PolicyDhara
Publishing
The bet
The policy brief is the wrong genre for what needs to be felt. Tell the story from inside the world instead.
What happened
The Very Last Superhero, a dystopian novel following a fourteen-year-old in a climate-collapsed India. Published, bestselling on Amazon.in.
StoryWell Books
Mobile health
The bet
An automated voice call reaches women who cannot read, in their own language, at the right gestational week. Design the calls to be welcomed rather than tolerated.
What happened
Kilkari became one of the largest mobile maternal health services in the world, delivering weekly audio messages timed to each stage of pregnancy and early infancy across multiple Indian states.
Kilkari
Photography
The bet
Most travel photography lives on Instagram and dies there. Print it well, price it honestly, and offer the wall — not the feed — as the final medium.
What happened
Phototales Studio sells curated travel photography as museum-quality prints. The wall is the gallery, and the price is set so a first-time buyer can take the risk.
Phototales Studio
Commentary
The bet
The mainstream press skips the policy detail. Write the pieces they skip — rights, governance, electoral patterns, the things that get filed under “too complicated” — and keep them sharp enough to be quoted.
What happened
Policy Grounds Press has published fifty-plus pieces on Indian policy, rights, and governance. The archive rotates on the homepage and the writing is syndicated across outlets.
Policy Grounds Press
Civic data
The bet
Build state-level maps across demography, health, gender, economy, education, and environment, and let the visual divergence speak louder than the national average ever could.
What happened
How India Lives is a pedagogical tool showing 205 state-level maps of India’s diversity. Used in classrooms and policy discussions to explain why India’s states diverge and why that divergence matters for programme design.
How India Lives
Mobile health
The bet
Give the health worker a tool she trusts more than her memory. Print the counselling points on cards, link each card to a short audio clip via mobile, and let the worker play the clip during the home visit.
What happened
Mobile Kunji reached millions of frontline health workers across Bihar. The combination of physical cards and mobile audio gave workers a script they could lean on without reading from a manual.
Mobile Kunji
Data methods
The bet
District data is too coarse for local decisions but village data does not exist at scale. Small-area estimation can bridge the gap if the model is honest about what it is interpolating and what it is guessing.
What happened
The PEARL methodology produced block-level estimates from district-level surveys, giving programme managers sub-district granularity for the first time in states where no census update had arrived in over a decade.
PEARL methodology
Education
The bet
Development jargon locks people out of conversations. Build a progressive web app that works without internet, covers MEL, Theory of Change, gender, and research methods — with mathematical notation where it matters.
What happened
ImpactLex is a free, offline-capable PWA with rigorous definitions of development sector terminology. Used by practitioners without reliable internet as a reference they can carry in their pocket.
ImpactLex
Digital agency
The bet
Movements need design as much as corporations do. Build the agency for the people changing things, price it for their budgets, and the word of mouth does the rest.
What happened
MakeItPOP Online runs as a boutique digital agency for nonprofits and social enterprises — campaigns, websites, and digital strategy for organisations that would otherwise go without professional design.
MakeItPOP Online
Entertainment-education
The bet
Embed the message inside a story people actually want to follow. If the characters change, the listeners might too.
What happened
Adhaa Ful aired as an entertainment-education drama reaching rural audiences. The format — story first, message second — outperformed direct messaging on listener recall and reported behaviour.
Adhaa Ful
Civic data
The bet
Most Indians overestimate their economic position. Build a calculator that uses real government data and lets a user type in their income to see where they actually fall. The shock is the pedagogy.
What happened
The Real Middle reveals where users stand in India’s income distribution using government data. Makes inequality concrete and personal in under ten seconds.
The Real Middle
Behaviour change
The bet
Work at the intersection of supply (health system readiness) and demand (community practices). Shape both at the same time, district by district, using frontline workers as the hinge.
What happened
The Ananya programme reached millions across Bihar, combining supply-side health strengthening with demand-side behaviour change through frontline workers. The ambition was the point — a state, not a pilot.
Ananya, Bihar
MEL design
The bet
Evaluation tells you what happened after the money is spent. A learning layer tells you what to change while the fund is still running. Build it in from the start.
What happened
The learning layer produced real-time evidence that was used to adjust fund priorities mid-cycle. Programme managers had data they could act on, not reports they could file.
Fund learning architecture
Open source
The bet
Yes, if the workflows ship as reusable notebooks with opinionated defaults and the onboarding assumes nothing.
What happened
EquityStack (Python) and FieldStack (R) run without a programming background. EquityStack is archived on Zenodo with a DOI. Eight OpenStacks components live on GitHub.
OpenStacks for Change
Behaviour change
The bet
Make the ad bold enough that people talk about it at home. The conversation the ad starts matters more than the ad itself.
What happened
Public health campaigns on family planning, breastfeeding, and complementary feeding reached tens of millions of households. The campaigns that landed were the ones audacious enough to name the behaviour plainly.
Public health mass media
Education measurement
The bet
Arts programmes get evaluated on attendance because nobody knows how to measure joy. Try anyway — use observation tools, child self-report, and teacher perceptions to triangulate something real about what the art is doing to the child.
What happened
A mixed-methods design captured socio-emotional outcomes including joy in a low-resource Mumbai school arts programme. The methodology showed that arts-based, non-linear outcomes can be evaluated honestly.
Joy in arts education
Knowledge curation
The bet
Practitioners want the interesting stuff from the research world without reading forty institutional websites. Curate it honestly, keep it short, send it six times a year.
What happened
The Research Rundown reaches development practitioners, students, and researchers across South Asia with curated research, evidence, and sector jobs in a format designed to be read, not filed.
The Research Rundown
Publishing
The bet
Flip the contract. Publisher signs an NDA to the author. Build a durability promise into the physical book. Let authors illustrate their own work.
What happened
StoryWell Books runs on this model. Multiple titles in the catalogue, and the author-led illustration loop is the house style.
StoryWell Books
Measurement
The bet
Resilience is culturally situated. A scale built in Canada will miss what matters to a child in an Indian slum. Adapt the Child and Youth Resilience Measure to read local realities — community, family, and cultural resources.
What happened
The CYRM was adapted for Indian contexts, giving practitioners a validated resilience measure that accounts for local protective factors rather than importing Western assumptions about what bouncing back looks like.
CYRM adaptation
Programme design
The bet
Cash transfers alone change behaviour temporarily. Design the incentive structure around the family system — conditional on school attendance, linked to the girl child staying enrolled, embedded in the existing welfare architecture so it survives a change of government.
What happened
Incentive design for a national child protection scheme covering child labour and child marriage, working within the POCSO and JJ Act mandate to align programme incentives with existing legal frameworks.
Child protection incentive design
Education
The bet
Children learn systems through narrative. Tell the story of a coin — where it comes from, where it goes, who touches it, what it buys — and the economics follow the plot.
What happened
Financial literacy modules for school children, built around narratives like the journey of a coin, reached classrooms years before fintech made financial literacy a startup pitch.
Financial literacy in schools
Education
The bet
Give families a voucher that covers fees at a private school of their choice. If the barrier is cost and the private schools are already trusted, the voucher closes the gap without building new classrooms.
What happened
India's first school vouchers field trial for girls, conducted in Old Delhi. An early RCT in a country where randomised evaluation of education policy was still rare.
School vouchers, Old Delhi
Civic tech
The bet
An AQI number is a fact. A resident’s lived experience of that AQI is also a fact. Put them in the same repository and see what happens to the conversation.
What happened
JanVayu is India’s first citizen-led AQI testimony layer, aggregating hyperlocal readings and resident accounts across Indian cities.
JanVayu
Climate resilience
The bet
Build the programming around what fishing communities already know about weather, and fill the specific gaps — where to go, what to carry, how to read the warnings — through radio they already listen to.
What happened
Lifeline programming for cyclone-prone Odisha launched years before climate adaptation entered mainstream development vocabulary. The approach — local knowledge first, institutional messaging second — became a template for later resilience work.
Lifeline programming, Odisha
Measurement
The bet
International school readiness scales miss what matters in Indian contexts. Build the instrument locally — local languages, local developmental markers, local validation — and prove it holds up statistically.
What happened
The School Readiness Instrument (SRI) was developed and validated for Indian ECCE contexts, measuring cognitive, socio-emotional, and physical development. One of the earliest locally built readiness tools in the country.
School Readiness Instrument (SRI)
Health systems
The bet
The district is where the state meets the ground. Small enough to manage, large enough to matter, and it is where the District Collector sits. Design the fund to move at this level.
What happened
The fund adopted the district as its primary unit of intervention, with health system strengthening and climate resilience programming designed around the administrative reality of Indian governance rather than donor convenience.
District-level health systems
Education measurement
The bet
Build a common evaluation framework — a Tulna (comparison) — that standardises what counts as an outcome across edtech products, so funders and schools can compare apples to apples.
What happened
The EdTech Tulna framework became a reference tool for assessing edtech effectiveness, giving the Indian education sector a shared vocabulary for what "works" means in digital learning.
EdTech Tulna
Migration economics
The bet
Rural households in seasonal poverty stay home because the bus fare to the city is a barrier they cannot finance. Cover the fare, and the migration — and the remittances — follow.
What happened
No Lean Season was designed with Yale RISE economists and tested as an RCT across three countries. The programme showed that a modest travel subsidy unlocked seasonal migration and measurably increased household consumption during the hungry months.
No Lean Season
Knowledge work
The bet
Build the editorial process around lived accounts and keep the chapters small. Real-time reporting is possible if the structure is designed for speed.
What happened
A Year of Havoc, co-edited and co-authored in 2022, collecting human experiences of the second wave of the COVID pandemic in India.
A Year of Havoc
Early childhood
The bet
Games, not apps. Ambient Indian contexts, not imported stock art. Meet the child where the phone actually lives.
What happened
India’s first Android educational games suite for early childhood, designed and evaluated in the field. Built when digital was not the default and educational apps were not yet a category.
Early childhood digital learning
Education
The bet
Paywalls are the wrong bottleneck. Curation, teaching voice, and practitioner-ready tools matter more.
What happened
48 courses, 400+ handouts, 16 learning games, 19 labs, a 247-tool dataverse, a 203-entry BCT repository, and 5,000+ monthly users across South Asia.
ImpactMojo
Gender rights
The bet
Give girls a structured platform — a Meena Manch — inside the school, with adult facilitation and peer accountability. If the girls speak up as a group, the community hears them differently than it hears one girl alone.
What happened
Meena Manch platforms were established across multiple Indian states, reaching thousands of schools. The collectives delayed marriages, increased school attendance, and created a voice that individual girls could not sustain on their own.
Meena Manch
Indian craft
The bet
The craft economy is full of beautiful work that never makes it past the local market. Curate the good stuff, research the makers, and build a guide that respects both the buyer and the artisan.
What happened
All The Good Stuff curates Indian craft and thoughtful gifts with researched guides to objects and makers. The curation is the product.
All The Good Stuff
AI in evaluation
The bet
Human-administered follow-up surveys are expensive and slow. An AI calling system can conduct structured interviews with fellowship alumni, capturing employment, civic engagement, and social capital data at a fraction of the cost and time.
What happened
An AI-assisted call survey was designed for tracking long-term alumni trajectories, combining automated structured interviews with targeted human follow-ups for deeper probing.
AI-assisted alumni tracking
Values
Six working rules for how the work gets made. They get forgotten under deadline pressure, which is why they are written down here.
We write reports that practitioners actually open on a Monday morning. The number has to answer a question somebody is already asking.
MEL work that stays on a shelf cost somebody money and helped nobody.
The voices at the edge of the data frame better questions than the terms of reference. We listen there first.
If your sampling frame is polite, you are sampling the wrong people.
If a programme officer cannot follow the argument at 3pm on a Tuesday, the argument needs rewriting. Jargon is where accountability goes to hide.
We have lost good ideas to bad sentences.
We publish openly when we can. The free edition reaches the practitioner who cannot afford to pay, and that practitioner is the one the work is for.
Access changes who gets to ask the question.
Every script, template, and workflow belongs to whoever needs it next. The sector runs on shared infrastructure and we contribute to it.
A hoarded method helps one team. A shared one helps a thousand.
Peaceful in most rooms, loud in the ones that need it. Evidence that sits on the fence is usually already serving whoever put the fence there.
Silence during harm is a position, and we know which one.
The playbook
There is no magic. There is a loop that runs many times before anything gets a name. It looks like this.
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
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
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
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
Work & writing
Essays, dispatches, and the slower work of making sense of what the data actually says. Two places the writing lives.
Sharper commentary on Indian policy, rights, and the things mainstream coverage quietly skips. Six of fifty-odd pieces, shuffled on each redeploy so the rotation keeps moving.
A bi-monthly curation of development research, evidence, and sector jobs from South Asia and beyond. Once every two months.
Longer, slower pieces on research, measurement, parenting, and the view from the edges of the development sector. Self-hosted here on the site.
Free Field Kit
Twelve questions to ask before you commission, design, or fund a piece of MEL work. One page, free to share, printable as a PDF. A companion to The Measurement Trap.
Notes
20 short working notes on measurement, field practice, and what the data actually says. Shuffled on each rebuild — showing 8 of 20.
Read a child the same book twice in one sitting. The second reading is the one that actually teaches.
Resilience looks different in a Mumbai slum than it does in a Toronto suburb. A scale that cannot see the difference is measuring its own assumptions.
A grant is a bet on a person before it is a bet on a project. Fund the person with the question, not the prettiest logframe.
Power leaves traces on the calendar before it leaves traces on the budget. Read the calendar first.
An indicator is a promise about what you will pay attention to. Pick only the ones you can afford to keep.
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.
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.
A country that does not measure its own inequality is not failing to measure. It is choosing not to know.
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.
Every brief says 'strategy'. Most briefs mean 'somebody to blame later'. Read the second one, and quote for the first.
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.
A cash transfer changes behaviour for as long as the cash lasts. An incentive embedded in the welfare architecture changes behaviour for as long as the government stands.
If you cannot measure joy in a classroom, the problem is with your instrument, not with the joy. Try harder.
If a training does not change what a participant does on the following Monday, it was a performance, not a training.
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.
The communities most at risk from climate change are the ones with the least data about it. The adaptation gap starts at the weather station.
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.
India has not conducted a census since 2011. Every policy decision made with that data is a bet on a country that no longer exists.
A bus ticket is a financial instrument. The family that cannot afford the fare to the city during the lean season stays poor until someone covers it.
On Rotation
A few things on the desk this month. A bit of reading, something to watch, something to listen to. Updated when something better shows up, and not before.
Reading
Books from the desk and the shelf behind it. The full list lives at /shelf.
Watching
Two screening clubs, an RSVP aggregator, and three films worth the whole evening.
Listening
Hindi golden age, Bengali soul, Tamil melodies, folk protest, ambient for the writing desk, and a lot of country.
On the podcast shelf
Sixteen shows in heavy rotation — development, law, climate, and a few dailies.
About
Varna Sri Raman has spent twenty years at the edges where research, story, and practice meet. She reads evidence for a living. She reads most other things for the love of it.
The questions keep coming back to the same few. What are we measuring, and does it match what we mean? Whose voice gets to frame the problem, and who has to live with the answer? Why do so many good reports end up on a shelf? Policy briefs rarely fit these questions, so she writes in whichever form will hold them — essays, working papers, a dystopian novel, children's picture books, and a handful of longer books still taking shape.
The writing is half the work.
Off the clock, she is wife, daughter, and sister inside a loud, loving family, and mum to two sons. Heera the dog still lives here and is much loved. Two cats used to, until they ran away for love — they spent six months quietly duping her by bringing lookalikes home at dinner time for the extra meal, an operation she respects. Free time goes to books, watercolour painting, astrophysics rabbit holes, and a lot of music — mandolin, sitar, and piano on the speakers, guitar in her hands (barely). When not otherwise occupied with her projects, Varna can be found curled up by the window howling at the moon. A peaceful bibliophile until confronted by a fascist.
In print
Collaborate
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.