Idealog Works · An Ideas Place · Innovation + Impact
Ideas that work.
Thirty-six ventures in consulting, education, technology, publishing, photography, research, civic life, elections and archival protest work, along with the Innovation Advisory canvas suite. They share one question, which is how knowledge and story change what development practice does.
The name describes a practice. Ideas get written down and tried, and then they are kept or retired. The ones that survive grow into ventures, and the ones that do not still feed the ones that do. Everything on this site is an idea being logged, a venture in the works, or notes from the bench in between.
The ventures
Thirty-six ventures, one question.
Thirty-six projects at different stages. Sixteen run every day with people using them, fourteen are still settling into their shape, and six are early sketches. All of them ask how knowledge, stories and evidence can change what development work does on the ground.
Active in use
Consulting · MEL · Social research
PinPoint Ventures Advisory
A registered social research and advisory practice, running since 2016. It designs monitoring, evaluation and learning systems, evaluates programmes, runs applied research and advises development funders, implementers and civil society groups. Recent clients include the Gates Foundation, the India Health and Climate Resilience Fund, Fish Welfare Initiative (Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture), Claylab Education, GAIN, the Development Intelligence Unit at Transform Rural India, Railway Children India and Oxfam India. Since 2022 it has also taken research and evaluation work as senior consultant to Populi Research Services.
Archive · Protest · Civic tech
Democracy by Design
The questionCan two people build a crowdsourced protest archive in an afternoon, and keep the protesters in it safe?
A crowdsourced archive of the posters, placards and photographs from India's student protests, co-founded with Pallavi Nayak. The first version was built in two hours after the Rapid Action Force cleared protesters at Jantar Mantar in July 2026. Faces are obscured before anything is published, each photograph's metadata is checked and compared with public sources, and short essays explain the context of each placard. The archive now holds 651 photographs and 27 essays, and The Hindu wrote about it in August 2026.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
The bet
After a state crackdown, the visual record of a peaceful protest starts disappearing within days. Placards are discarded, photographs are taken down and memories are overwritten. A lightweight crowdsourced repository, set up quickly with the safety guardrails built in first, can keep what would otherwise be lost.
Accountability · Protest · Civic tech
Who Gave The Order
The questionCan an accountability archive refuse to state anything without a source, and still be useful while most of its fields read unknown?
A citizen-led accountability archive that asks who authorised each use of state power against citizens. It records 92 incidents from 2014 to 2026, 24 of them in 2026, including the student protests of July, along with the FIRs registered against protesters in Mumbai, Kochi, Kolkata and Assam. No claim appears on the site as a fact without a source, and every field that has none reads unknown. In none of the 92 has the archive found a written order authorising the use of force, and each incident page says so.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
The bet
When state power is used against citizens, the first account is usually the loudest one. An archive that shows only what a source supports, and says plainly what it does not know, will be slower to fill and easier to trust.
Elections · Voter rolls · Data journalism
Off the Roll
The questionCan a public analysis of the electoral roll revision compute every figure from the officials' own tables when the page loads, so that a corrected table corrects every sentence that depends on it?
An analysis of the Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls, state by state. Across the 31 states and union territories with a published draft roll by 30 September 2026, the draft rolls left off 13.39 crore names, about 14 in every 100 electors. Twenty-four states have since published final rolls, and measured against those the removals come to 8.87 crore, about 12 in every 100. Every figure comes from the Chief Electoral Officers' own tables. It sets the removals against winning margins, against women's share of the roll and against the reasons officers recorded. It covers Bihar booth by booth and five Old City seats in Hyderabad from the elector lists, and reads in English, Hindi, Urdu, Telugu, Tamil and Bengali. Built by PinPoint Ventures.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
The bet
Numbers typed into prose drift away from their sources, and an analysis that asks the Election Commission to publish its data has to show its own working. If every finding is computed from the Chief Electoral Officers' tables, and the build refuses to run when a table does not add up to the published totals, the pages stay right as the data changes.
Book companion · Data essays · Indian statistics
What Counts · The Measurement Trap
The companion site for The Measurement Trap: India's Quest for Social Progress Through Eight Decades, a book by Varna Sri Raman. The manuscript is finished and the book is in production at Routledge, which lists the hardback for March 2027. The site carries the book's plan, a sourced chronology of Indian official statistics and seven data essays on what the country counts and when, among them Ninety-six years between counts on the caste census and Eleven years without a number on the consumption survey.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
Book companion · Speculative fiction · Climate
Postheroic.World · The Very Last Superhero
The companion site for the illustrated novel The Very Last Superhero (StoryWell Books, 2025), set in a near-future India after climate collapse and told through Sumati, a fourteen-year-old girl. The site holds the novel's Resistance Archive of 45 lore entries, 17 timeline events and a catalogue of recovered objects, across 104 pages.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
Open data · Infrastructure · Political economy
Industry Conglomerates Database
An open, searchable map of 386 infrastructure projects of the Adani group (310) and Reliance (76) from 1998 to 2026, each classified by the kind of support the Government of India gave it. Nearly every record carries its source links. The full dataset can be downloaded as CSV and Excel.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
Newsletter · Development research · South Asia
The Research Rundown
The questionWill practitioners read development research every day if each edition is short?
A newsletter of development research, evidence and sector jobs from South Asia and beyond, for practitioners, students and researchers. A daily edition carries the day's research, Friday Findings rounds up the week, and occasional specials take one theme, such as the Gandhi Jayanti edition of 3 October 2026. SignalStack mirrors the archive and holds the tools that go with its methods notes.
The questions and the bets
Will practitioners read development research every day if each edition is short?
Six editions a year left too long between a paper coming out and anyone in the field hearing of it. A short daily edition, with a round-up at the end of the week, keeps the research close to the decisions it could inform.
Can a selection of development research sent every two months ease the “I should read more” guilt most practitioners carry?
Practitioners want the interesting work from the research world without reading forty institutional websites. Curate it carefully, keep it short and send it six times a year.
The questionCan the approach that built LittleK for a first-grader work for a Class 8 student revising seven subjects?
Two learning sites built for the founder's own children and opened to anyone. LittleK is a learn-and-play platform for Class 1 CBSE, with worksheets in English, Hindi and Mathematics, flashcards, sticker rewards, progress tracking and read-aloud in Indian and device voices. ALab is a revision app for Class 8 CBSE across seven subjects (Science, Mathematics, Sanskrit, Hindi, English, Social Science, and AI and Thinking), with practice questions, mind maps, worksheets, mock papers and the NCERT Hindi and Sanskrit chapters. Both follow the NCERT books.
The questions and the bets
Can the approach that built LittleK for a first-grader work for a Class 8 student revising seven subjects?
LittleK showed that a site built for one child at home can work for others. Class 8 revision is a harder test, with more subjects, longer chapters and examinations at the end of it.
Can you build a learn-and-play platform for one particular first-grader and have it work for other children in that grade?
Most learning platforms are built for a market and then narrowed toward a child. This one went the other way. It was built for one Class 1 CBSE reader in this house, with every design choice tuned to that child, to see whether it still worked when a stranger opened it.
The questionCan citizens’ pollution accounts sit alongside sensor data for accountability?
A citizen-led record of air pollution in Indian cities. It puts hyperlocal AQI readings beside residents' own accounts of the air they breathe, and checks its policy claims against the Commission for Air Quality Management's orders and the GRAP schedule. An AI assistant turns a sensor reading and the testimony around it into questions a resident can take to an official. A Delhi page and docs in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and Tamil went up in October 2026.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
The questions and the bets
Can citizens’ pollution accounts sit alongside sensor data for accountability?
An AQI number is a fact, and a resident's experience of that AQI is also a fact. Put both in the same repository and see how the conversation changes.
Can an AI assistant translate AQI sensor data and citizen testimony into actions a resident can take?
A raw AQI number is hard for a parent or a school principal to act on. An AI layer on top of JanVayu turns a reading and resident testimony into a plain-language answer to a question such as “should I keep the windows shut today?”, grounded in the data behind the number.
Publishing · Commentary · Indian politics
Policy Grounds Press
The questionCan one writer with strong opinions build a policy commentary column that people actually use?
Commentary on Indian policy, rights and politics, including the stories mainstream coverage leaves out. Seventy essays are in the archive as of October 2026, from the Union Budget and CAG reports to the electoral rolls, the census and the student protests, and several have been syndicated to other outlets.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
The bet
The mainstream press skips the policy detail. Write the pieces it skips on rights, governance, electoral patterns and other subjects filed under “too complicated”, and make them sharp enough to be quoted.
Civic tech · Policy tracker · Evidence
PolicyDhara
The questionCan a practitioner answer a policy question about an Indian government scheme in under a minute instead of an afternoon?
A tracker for Indian government announcements, welfare schemes, bills, circulars and budget lines, searchable in one place and refreshed every six hours. Its Evidence pages set out 34 Indian interventions that have a published evaluation, with the study design, the effects and the caveats for each. A Telegram channel carries the new high-priority policies.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
The questions and the bets
Can a practitioner answer a policy question about an Indian government scheme in under a minute instead of an afternoon?
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.
Can a Telegram channel deliver Indian policy updates to a practitioner’s phone in under sixty seconds of reading?
The PolicyDhara web tracker is useful, but you have to open a tab to see it. A short daily push on the platform practitioners already keep open should get a better open rate than any newsletter.
Field kits · Frameworks · MEL practice
Innovation Advisory · The Canvas
The questionCan a free printable framework change how MEL is commissioned?
Eighteen free, printable, one-page frameworks for development practitioners, meant for the point before a proposal is written, an indicator is signed or an evaluation reports. They are Venture Readiness, the Measurement Checklist, the Evidence Canvas, the Scale Decision, the Kill Criteria, the Causal Pathway Review (CLEAR), the Indicator Test (VALID), the Knowledge Map (Rumsfeld), the Survey Bias Audit, the Feedback Loop, the Handover Canvas, the Baseline Design Test, the Aspiration Gap Framework, the Rapid Civic Tech Canvas, the Curriculum-Construct Fit, the Administrative List Test, the High-Frequency Check and Source Before You Say It. Each one prints as a PDF and has been used in classrooms and field reviews in South Asia.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
The bet
The expensive mistakes happen at the framing meeting, well before the analysis. Put the awkward questions on one page that is free to share and prints as a PDF, and practitioners will use it because having the conversation then costs less than skipping it.
Open source · Civic tech · Research tools
OpenStacks for Change
The questionCan a MEL toolkit be used by practitioners who have never written code?
Open-source tools for public-interest research, in three stacks. InsightStack holds MEL tools, loaders for DHS and PLFS microdata and six browser calculators. FieldStack is R code for the weeks a survey is still in the field. EquityStack is Python for inequality measures and design-based estimates from complex samples. SignalStack is the companion archive for the Research Rundown newsletter, and openstacks.dev is the index. PolicyStack has been replaced by PolicyDhara, and RootStack, BridgeStack and ViewStack are archived.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
The bet
It can, if the workflows ship as reusable notebooks with opinionated defaults and the onboarding assumes no prior knowledge.
Publishing · Women-led
StoryWell Books
The questionCan an indie publisher put author interests first?
A women-led independent publisher of Indian voices on social justice and climate, co-founded in 2019. The catalogue has 97 books across fiction, children's books and political non-fiction, and 40 audio stories for children.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
The questions and the bets
Can an indie publisher put author interests first?
Reverse the usual contract, so that the publisher signs an NDA with the author. Build a durability promise into the physical book, and let authors illustrate their own work.
Can a novel make climate collapse more visible than a policy brief?
A policy brief is the wrong form for something that has to be felt, so the novel tells the story from inside that world.
The questionCan an interactive tool show someone where they actually stand in India’s income distribution?
A free development education platform for practitioners in South Asia. It has 106 courses (22 flagship and 84 foundational), 35 Labs, Studios for hands-on work, 135 games on policy and behavioural economics, 192 Reading Companions to development texts, 27 Deep Dives, the ImpactLex glossary, a Dataverse of 325 data sources, 21 Data Explorers (ASER, UDISE+, NFHS, AISHE and PLFS among them), Field Radio, eight plain-language Law Guides for the Indian social sector and a paid Pro Tools tier. More than 13,000 practitioners use it.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
The questions and the bets
Can an interactive tool show someone where they actually stand in India’s income distribution?
Most Indians overestimate their economic position. A calculator built on government data lets a user type in their income and see where they fall, and the surprise is what teaches.
Can a development education platform be fully free and still reach 5,000 people a month?
A paywall is the wrong thing to build around. Curation, a teaching voice and practitioner-ready tools matter more for reach.
Can a pocket glossary of development terminology work offline on a practitioner’s phone?
Development jargon shuts people out of conversations. A progressive web app that works without internet can cover MEL, Theory of Change, gender and research methods, with mathematical notation where it matters.
Can an AI transcription tool be tuned for the language and context of South Asian development research interviews?
Generic transcription engines garble the names, places, schemes and code-switched English, Hindi and vernacular sentences that fill a development research interview. A tool trained on the research vocabulary makes transcription a useful step in the pipeline.
Can interactive browser tools replace the consultancy slide deck for Theory of Change and logframe work?
Most ToC and logframe work happens in PowerPoint, which makes every drag difficult. Browser tools that are free, need no login and come with opinionated defaults make the workshop faster and the result easy to share.
The questionCan 259 choropleth maps of India make the country’s internal diversity legible to someone who has never read a dataset?
A state-level atlas of India. It has 259 maps, each with a takeaway and a policy note, on demography, health, gender, the economy, education and the environment, and a live map over 106 indicators that can rank the states or plot two indicators against each other. Newer NFHS-6 and PLFS 2025 figures sit beside the older surveys, and a map that cannot be updated carries a note saying why.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
The bet
Build state-level maps across demography, health, gender, economy, education and environment, and let the differences between states show what a national average hides.
Library · Research · South Asia
Development Discourses
A library of 687 papers, books and reports for development practitioners in South Asia, across 19 topics. Each item is tagged open access, free to read or check access, and every link is checked daily.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
Library · Case studies · Global South
Dev Case Studies
208 cited case studies of development programmes in 117 countries, searchable and filterable, with about 960 references between them. Each study is marked by the kind of evidence it draws on, which describes its sources and does not rate its quality.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
Dashboard · SDGs · India
SDG Progress Tracker
India's progress on all 17 Sustainable Development Goals, with scores, trends, radar charts and category breakdowns.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
Dashboard · World Bank data · India
India Development Indicators
A dashboard of India across economic, health, education, infrastructure and environmental indicators, with live World Bank data. The human development index and infrastructure spending figures are static, because no free public source exists for them.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
Dashboard · Emissions · Climate
Climate TRACE India
Greenhouse-gas emissions in India from Climate TRACE, by sector and facility, across power, manufacturing, transport, fossil-fuel operations, agriculture and waste, including the top-emitting coal and steel plants.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
Public finance · Union Budget · Policy Grounds Press
Budget 2026-27 Explorer
An explorer of the Union Budget 2026-27, built from the Demands for Grants and the Expenditure Profile statements and checked against the Budget Speech. For each scheme it sets the actual spending, the budget and revised estimates and the new estimate side by side, so underspending shows. It has pages on off-budget spending, employment promises and six sectors: education, health, environment, women, infrastructure and agriculture. It carries the Policy Grounds Press name.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
Informal workers · Social security · Bihar
Act Now India
Act Now India helps informal workers in Barari block, Katihar, Bihar, register for and receive the social security the law already owes them. Independent research with it produced a survey of 401 informal workers, a 40-page report, an interactive explorer that shows no group smaller than ten people, and an anonymised dataset released under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
Data archive · Crimes against women · NCRB
Women on Record
Crimes against women in India as police and courts recorded them, 2014 to 2024, from the National Crime Records Bureau's Crime in India. It has a page for each of the 36 states and union territories and for 17 crime headings, follows a case from the police stage to the court stage, and sets the recorded figures beside survey data on what never reaches the police. States are listed alphabetically and never ranked, because NCRB warns against comparing them. The whole dataset downloads as CSV and Excel, and the site reads in English, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Bengali and Marathi. Built by PinPoint Ventures.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
Printables · Workbooks · Classes 1 to 12
PaperChime
Printable workbooks, worksheets and topic practice for Classes 1 to 12, with pathways for CBSE, ICSE and ISC, state boards, Cambridge, IB and NIOS. It opened on 20 October 2026 and carries 160 topic-practice sets, decodable readers and free samples for every class. A buyer pays by UPI and the download unlocks once the payment is confirmed. It is run by Pinpoint Ventures.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
Colouring · Free · Children
Chromalie
A free colouring studio from StoryWell Books. It holds 688 pages in ten collections, among them 22 Festivals of India pages, and children colour them in the browser.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
Photography · Daily mailer · Prints
Phototales Studio
The questionCan curated travel photography printed on museum-quality paper work as affordable wall art?
Travel photography. A daily mailer sends one photograph and the story behind it every morning, and the site sells prints from a catalogue of 523 photographs from India and abroad, each with notes on how it was taken. Prints are priced so that someone buying their first one can take the risk.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
The bet
Most travel photography stays on Instagram and is forgotten there. Print it well, price it fairly, and treat the wall as the final medium.
Craft · Woodwork · Bengaluru
Pika Woodcraft
The online catalogue of a handmade woodwork studio in Bengaluru. It shows 19 pieces of custom furniture, restorations and upcycled work, each with its own page, and a buyer orders by WhatsApp once the design and the price are agreed.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
Research project · India · 2004-2026
Some Perspective
The questionCan a single researcher build three novel indices that make India’s economic and democratic paradox legible across two decades?
An independent research project on why India grew richer between 2004 and 2026 while its democratic institutions weakened. Three indices, of statistical suppression, fiscal centralisation and democratic quality, link the macroeconomic series to individual stories. The data is open and the charts are interactive.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
The bet
Mainstream macroeconomic indicators hide the divergence between aggregate growth and individual lives. Three new indices, Statistical Suppression, Fiscal Centralisation and Democratic Quality, track 2004-2026 in ways the standard dashboards do not.
Sketching early, company welcome
Stage zero · Tech experiments
idealogworks.foo
The scratchpad. Small tools, proofs of concept and side projects live here while an idea is tested, before it earns a name of its own.
Bihar · Society · Economy · Field resource
Bihar Parichay
An interactive reference on Bihar for people who work there: researchers, journalists, policy workers, organisers and fieldworkers running listening circles. It covers the state's geography and flood politics, caste and land ownership, electoral sociology, the economy and migration, justice, climate, food, crafts, the performing arts and the digital media people use, with maps, data and short histories in one place.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
Browser tools · Economics · Law · Data
Experiments
Twenty-one tools that run in the browser, for development economics, law and data work. Among them are a court translator, a formatter that sets a filing to a court's rules, a petition builder, calculators for statutory interest and land acquisition compensation, an RCT planner, a causal inference workbench, and tools on poverty and inequality, the gender wage gap, heat exposure and air quality.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
Civic tech · Elections · Privacy
Ummidvaar Dastaavez · Candidate Dossier
A tool that turns a spreadsheet of candidate records into printable one-page dossiers, one candidate to a page. It runs entirely in the browser, so the list is never uploaded anywhere, and it masks each candidate's phone number and email address on the printed page.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
Indian craft · Thoughtful gifts
All The Good Stuff
The questionCan a curated guide to Indian craft objects help people find gifts that last, from makers worth knowing about?
Researched guides to Indian craft and to gifts that last, and to the makers behind them.
The bet
The craft economy is full of beautiful work that never travels beyond the local market. A guide that curates good work and researches the makers can serve the buyer and the artisan.
Digital agency · Non-profits · Civic groups
MakeItPop
The questionCan a digital agency survive by serving only nonprofits and social enterprises?
A digital agency for non-profits, funders and civic groups in India. It builds websites and web apps, campaigns, WhatsApp and voice outreach, community and social-network research, and civic tech such as archives and data explorers, and publishes the sources behind every figure. Pricing is set for non-profits, with a sliding scale for grant-funded organisations.
Facts checked 6 November 2026
The bet
Movements need design as much as corporations do. Build the agency for the people changing things, price it for their budgets, and let word of mouth bring in the rest.
Ideas, tested
Things we tried and what they did.
35 experiments and studies that did not become ventures of their own, shuffled on each rebuild. Each has a question, a bet, and an outcome. The ventures above carry their own question and bet. Showing 8 of 35.
01
Welfare at slaughter
Does anyone check whether the way farmed fish are killed causes them to suffer?
The bet
Most farmed fish die without the method ever being examined for welfare. You cannot improve what no one has watched, so the first step is structured field observation of how killing actually happens.
What happened
Field observation of ice-slurry killing, recording the practice as it happens on farms, to establish whether a welfare problem exists and how large it is before anyone proposes a fix.
↳ Slaughter-welfare observation
02
Behaviour change
Can mass media ads shift private health decisions such as contraception, breastfeeding and complementary feeding, in a country where these conversations happen behind closed doors?
The bet
Make the ad bold enough that people talk about it at home, because the conversation it 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 worked were the ones that named the behaviour plainly.
↳ Public health mass media
03
Women & aspirations
Can you measure what rural women want alongside what they have, without collapsing the two into one number that hides which is which?
The bet
Development surveys measure attainment (what women have) and treat aspiration as noise. Measuring aspiration and attainment separately, in matched pairs across ten life domains and five life stages, makes the gap between them the finding.
What happened
Badalte Khwaab is a telephonic survey of 6,092 rural women across 15 states, led with Development Intelligence Unit and Transform Rural India Foundation. Its central finding is that the gap between what women want and what they have is largest among the youngest cohort (23%). 38% of unmarried girls aged 15-19 place themselves at the very bottom of a life ladder, while 71% still expect the next five years to improve. The report reads life stage, caste and geography together instead of reporting a national average.
↳ Badalte Khwaab · Women’s Aspirations in a Changing India
04
MEL design
Can a health fund build a dedicated learning layer, in addition to an evaluation, inside the fund itself?
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, so programme managers had data they could act on.
↳ Fund learning architecture
05
Media and attitudes
Has the medium that shifts rural women’s gender attitudes moved from the living room to their hands?
The bet
Twenty years ago, the arrival of cable television in a village tracked lower son preference and less acceptance of wife-beating. Cable was new then, so watching it set you apart. Interviewing three generations of women in one household, separately, shows whether television still carries that signal or whether the phone has taken it over.
What happened
A triadic pilot in 115 households, interviewing a grandmother, mother and unmarried daughter in each. Daily social media use ran at 80 percent among daughters and 2 percent among grandmothers. Daughters who used social media daily reported markedly lower son preference, and each extra platform a mother used tracked about eight points more say in household decisions. Television no longer pointed in one direction. Nothing moved the acceptance of wife-beating in any generation. The smartphone is now the medium most plausibly shifting these attitudes.
↳ Three-generation media and gender study
06
Behaviour change
Can a state-wide behaviour change programme shift health practices across one of India’s poorest states?
The bet
Work on supply (health system readiness) and demand (community practices) at the same time, district by district, with frontline workers connecting the two.
What happened
The Ananya programme reached millions across Bihar, combining supply-side health strengthening with demand-side behaviour change through frontline workers. It set out to change practice across a whole state, where most programmes stop at a pilot.
↳ Ananya, Bihar
07
Animal welfare
Can you run a randomised trial on whether a welfare programme actually improves conditions for farmed fish?
The bet
Fish welfare in aquaculture gets asserted more than it gets measured against a counterfactual. Set up a controlled pilot. Treatment ponds get water-quality monitoring and stocking-density guidance, control ponds carry on as usual, and dissolved oxygen, ammonia, and the rest get read off both.
What happened
A randomised pilot across 38 carp ponds in coastal Andhra Pradesh, 76 measurements, built to validate the protocol before a full evaluation. It found control ponds sitting outside safe dissolved-oxygen ranges much of the time, and confirmed the parameters could separate treated ponds from untreated ones, which is what makes the larger trial worth running.
↳ Aquaculture welfare evaluation
08
Programme design
How do you design incentives for a national child protection programme that addresses both child labour and child marriage?
The bet
Cash transfers alone change behaviour temporarily, so the incentive structure was designed around the family. It is conditional on school attendance, linked to the girl staying enrolled, and built into the existing welfare system so that 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
09
Education
Can a story about a coin teach financial literacy to children who have never held a bank account?
The bet
Children learn systems through narrative. The story of a coin follows where it comes from, where it goes, who handles it and what it buys, and the economics comes along with the plot.
What happened
Financial literacy modules for school children, built around narratives such as the journey of a coin, reached classrooms years before fintech made financial literacy a startup pitch.
↳ Financial literacy in schools
10
Electoral integrity
Whose names leave the voter roll between revisions?
The bet
Rolls are revised and names drop off. Compared across revisions, the deletions are unevenly spread, so the work maps who is removed and where.
What happened
Constituency-level analysis of elector deletions across four states, feeding commentary on roll revision. One piece ran in a national daily.
↳ Elector deletion analysis
11
AI in evaluation
Can AI-administered phone calls track long-term outcomes of a fellowship programme at scale?
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
12
Measurement
Can you measure resilience in children growing up in adversity, using a tool that respects what resilience means in their context?
The bet
Resilience depends on culture, and a scale built in Canada will miss what matters to a child in an Indian slum. The Child and Youth Resilience Measure was adapted to read local community, family and cultural resources.
What happened
The CYRM was adapted for Indian contexts. Practitioners now have a validated resilience measure that accounts for local protective factors instead of importing Western assumptions about what bouncing back looks like.
↳ CYRM adaptation
13
Representation audit
Do the people picking candidates pick their own caste?
The bet
An observer’s caste and the caste of the candidates they rank first are both in the data. Comparing each observer’s top picks with the caste mix of their own candidate pool and the district’s demographics turns any disproportion into a measured number instead of an accusation.
What happened
A pool-adjusted bias index found specific patterns: districts where both top picks came from one dominant caste, majority-Adivasi districts with no Scheduled Tribe candidate in first preference, and conflict-of-interest cases where a proposer’s phone number matched a candidate’s. It was delivered as a standalone diagnostic.
↳ Caste representation diagnostic
14
Early childhood
Can Android games teach school readiness to children who have never touched a screen?
The bet
Use games, because children play them, and set them in familiar Indian surroundings drawn for the purpose in place of imported stock art. Design for the phone the family already has.
What happened
India's first Android educational games suite for early childhood, designed and evaluated in the field. It was built before digital was the default and before educational apps were a category.
↳ Early childhood digital learning
15
Entertainment-education
Can a radio drama shift social norms around gender, health, and family planning in rural India?
The bet
Put the message inside a story people want to follow. If the characters change, the listeners might change too.
What happened
Adhaa Ful aired as an entertainment-education drama for rural audiences. Its format put the story first and the message second, and it did better than direct messaging on listener recall and reported behaviour.
↳ Adhaa Ful
16
Political accountability
Can you grade the people a party sends to assess its own district units, using only the records they file?
The bet
Observers sent to evaluate local units file reports, candidate names and supporting documents through a portal. Turning those records into a weighted, auditable score shows the party who did the work.
What happened
A seven-parameter grading framework that scores observers A to D on report quality, daily activity, documentation, proposed names, and timeliness. Runs across more than 700 districts in 23 states and recomputes from the same database on a monthly cycle.
↳ Observer grading framework
17
Survey methods
Can a single baseline survey carry 119 separate comparisons without misleading you?
The bet
A large household baseline invites fishing. Run that many tests and some look significant by chance. Correct for it up front and report what survives.
What happened
Baseline design and analysis for a household survey of 2,800 households across four districts in Jharkhand, 119 bivariate analyses with Bonferroni correction.
↳ Household baseline analysis
18
Education measurement
Can you measure joy as an outcome of an arts programme in a government school?
The bet
Arts programmes are evaluated on attendance because nobody knows how to measure joy. This study tried anyway, using observation tools, child self-report and teacher perceptions to triangulate what the art does for 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 with rigour.
↳ Joy in arts education
19
Knowledge work
Can a book-length record of a crisis be written while the crisis is still happening?
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, collects people’s experiences of the second wave of the COVID pandemic in India.
↳ A Year of Havoc
20
Education measurement
What are you measuring when you measure “critical thinking”?
The bet
A state government commissioned a randomised trial of a critical thinking curriculum. The construct has to be fixed before the curriculum can be evaluated, or the trial will only measure its own instrument.
What happened
Research advisory on a government-school RCT, covering evaluation design, instrument review, and the measurement choices that decide what the trial can and cannot conclude. Ongoing.
↳ Critical thinking RCT
21
Health systems
Can a climate and health fund use the district as the unit of change in India's public health system, in place of the state or the village?
The bet
The district is where the state meets the ground. It is small enough to manage and large enough to matter, and the District Collector sits there. The fund was designed to work 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 structure of Indian governance.
↳ District-level health systems
22
Field data privacy
How do you publish a hand-drawn village map without handing over the village?
The bet
A field researcher’s sketch map carries the details that identify a place, such as which community lives on which street, where the temple and the well are, and the shape of the caste hamlets. That detail is useful for analysis and cannot be published as drawn. The pipeline strips the identifying detail and keeps the community geography the analysis needs.
What happened
A reproducible notebook that flattens a scanned paper map to clean white, keeps the pen colours that mark community boundaries, removes road names and identifying landmarks with inpainting and donor-texture matching so no ghost trace remains, relabels villages by number in a hand-drawn style, and swaps or shifts landmarks under pre-agreed rules so two tiers of anonymisation produce the same result no matter who runs them. Every transformation is logged, so the de-identification is itself auditable.
↳ Map anonymisation pipeline
23
Measurement
Can you build a psychometrically valid instrument to measure whether Indian children are ready for school?
The bet
International school readiness scales miss what matters in Indian contexts. Build the instrument locally, with local languages, local developmental markers and local validation, and show that 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. It was one of the earliest locally built readiness tools in the country.
↳ School Readiness Instrument (SRI)
24
Discrimination and development
Does caste still set the ceiling on what a rural household can become, after you control for everything else?
The bet
Discrimination shows up as gaps in income, mobility, and opportunity, but raw gaps confound caste with everything correlated to it. Build the study and the design so the caste effect can be separated from the rest.
What happened
A field study on caste, social capital, and economic mobility in rural South India, covering survey design, household sampling, and the discrimination measurement most studies leave as a residual.
↳ Discrimination and Development study
25
Mobile health
Can an automated phone call service deliver stage-appropriate health information to pregnant women at scale?
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
26
Welfare delivery
What do women actually say about the cash the state sends them?
The bet
Direct cash transfers to women are counted as received or not received. The more revealing story is what happens after that: who controls the money once it lands, who is judged for taking it, and who absorbs the unpaid work of enrolling everyone else.
What happened
A multi-state qualitative study of stakeholder perspectives on women’s cash-transfer schemes, coding intra-household control, documentation exclusion, payment delays, social stigma, and the administrative burden pushed onto frontline workers.
↳ Cash transfer perspectives study
27
Gender rights
Can a girls' collective inside a school stop child marriages in the surrounding community?
The bet
Give girls a structured platform inside the school, a Meena Manch, with adult guidance and peer accountability. When the girls speak as a group, the community hears them differently from the way it hears one girl alone.
What happened
Meena Manch platforms were established across several Indian states, reaching thousands of schools. The collectives delayed marriages, raised school attendance, and gave girls a shared voice that none of them could sustain alone.
↳ Meena Manch
28
Welfare standards
Can fish welfare reach a country’s standards before the public thinks of fish as animals that can suffer?
The bet
Welfare rules usually follow public concern, and farmed fish sit near the bottom of that ladder. The technical route skips ahead through water-quality and stocking-density norms and through work with the bodies that set animal-welfare and quality standards.
What happened
Policy and standards work to move responsible aquaculture toward formal norms, running alongside the field programme with carp farmers, so that the practice has a rulebook to point to as well as a set of recommendations.
↳ Aquaculture standards work
29
Data methods
Can you estimate block-level health indicators from district-level data in a country where the census has not been updated since 2011?
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
30
Children’s books
Can a picture book teach geometry to five-year-olds through traditional kolam art?
The bet
Children learn shape and symmetry through their hands more than through textbooks. Put the maths inside a story about a girl, her ants and the rice-flour patterns on her doorstep, and the geometry comes with the story.
What happened
Kalyani’s Ant Problem was published as a picture book for ages 5-10, written and illustrated by the author. It teaches geometry through kolam, puts the story first and works in classrooms.
↳ Kalyani’s Ant Problem
31
Mobile health
Can a deck of illustrated cards and a phone number change what a frontline health worker says to a new mother?
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
32
Climate resilience
Can media programming prepare coastal communities for cyclones before climate resilience has a budget line?
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 the mainstream development vocabulary. It put local knowledge first and institutional messaging second, and later resilience work used it as a template.
↳ Lifeline programming, Odisha
33
Migration economics
Can a small travel subsidy during the lean agricultural season make seasonal migration possible and increase household income?
The bet
Rural households in seasonal poverty stay home because they cannot finance the bus fare to the city. Cover the fare and the migration follows, along with the remittances.
What happened
No Lean Season was designed with Yale RISE economists and tested as an RCT across three countries. A modest travel subsidy led to more seasonal migration and measurably increased household consumption during the hungry months.
↳ No Lean Season
34
Education
Can school vouchers for girls change enrolment patterns in the dense lanes of Old Delhi?
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 voucher field trial for girls, conducted in Old Delhi. It was an early RCT at a time when randomised evaluation of education policy was still rare in India.
↳ School vouchers, Old Delhi
35
Education measurement
Can you measure the impact of edtech products on learning outcomes when every product defines “impact” differently?
The bet
Build a common evaluation framework, a Tulna (comparison), that standardises what counts as an outcome across edtech products, so that funders and schools compare like with like.
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
Values
A few things we hold true.
Six working rules for how the work gets made. They get forgotten under deadline pressure, which is why they are written down here.
01
Evidence is a craft.
We write reports that practitioners open on a Monday morning, and every number in them has to answer a question somebody is already asking.
MEL work that stays on a shelf cost somebody money and helped nobody.
02
Start at the margins.
People at the edge of the data often frame better questions than the terms of reference do, so we listen to them first.
A sampling frame that only reaches people who are easy to talk to is sampling the wrong people.
03
Say it plainly.
If a programme officer cannot follow the argument at 3pm on a Tuesday, the argument needs rewriting. Jargon makes it easy to avoid being held to account.
We have lost good ideas to bad sentences.
04
Free is a design decision.
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.
05
Own the work, share the tools.
Every script, template, and workflow belongs to whoever needs it next. The sector runs on shared infrastructure and we contribute to it.
A method kept to one team helps that team, and the same method shared can help a thousand.
06
Take a side.
We are peaceful in most rooms and loud in the ones that need it. Evidence that refuses to take a position usually ends up serving whoever set the terms of the debate.
Staying silent while harm is done is also a position, and we know which side we are on.
The playbook
How ideas become ventures.
Each idea goes through a loop of four stages, usually many times, before it gets a name.
01
Sense
Listen for a question that practitioners keep running into and that nobody has framed clearly yet. Look for the complaint underneath the complaint.
measured in weeks
02
Sketch
Prototype cheaply with a paper tool, a field survey, a notebook or a script. Show it to three people who will use it and fix what they dislike.
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 it first and tune it afterwards.
out in the world
04
Sustain
The venture builds its own team and its own runway. Some land with a partner organisation, some become independent, and a few are retired with thanks.
on its own feet
the loop runs many times
Work & writing
Notes from the field and the desk.
Essays, dispatches and longer work on what the data says. The writing is published in the places below.
Policy Grounds Press
policygrounds.press
Commentary on Indian policy, rights and the stories mainstream coverage skips. The list below is pulled live from the homepage, so it always shows the latest pieces.
Development research, evidence and sector jobs from South Asia and beyond: a daily edition, Friday Findings at the end of the week, and occasional specials. The latest nine editions are below, and every edition is in the archive.
Badalte Khwaab · Women’s Aspirations in a Changing IndiaDevelopment Intelligence Unit & Transform Rural India Foundation · 6,092 women, 15 states · 2026 · Research Lead (Quantitative)
India Inequality Report and India Discrimination ReportOxfam India · 2022
Because I Am a Girl: gender-biased sex selection laws and enforcement in IndiaPLAN India
A Framework for Operationalising the Capabilities Approach in Poverty ResearchWorld Bank & HDCA Poverty Measurement Journal · 2016
Schooling in Urban Slums in India: Choices, Capabilities and ConstraintsHDCA Journal · Helsinki · 2016
Study of Impact of ECE on Primary Level Outcomes: The Galli Galli Sim Sim Intervention in ICDSWith A. Banerjee · Journal of Childcare and Education Policy · 2012
Measuring School Readiness: The Sesame Workshop India ExperienceEntertainment Education Conference (EE5) · Johns Hopkins · 2011
Books in progress
The Measurement Trap
A history of welfare measurement in India, from the first Five Year Plans to Aadhaar-linked welfare, and what happens to the people who fall between the indicators. It argues that the metrics India chose shaped the country it got. Its companion site, whatcounts.in, carries seven data essays and a sourced chronology, and the Measurement Checklist is live here.
The Hate Effect
A political economy of communal violence in India. It looks at how hate is priced into elections, budgets and media cycles, and who pays when the cycle speeds up. It is still at the outline stage.
In the pipeline
A children's book on air quality
Tied to the JanVayu project. How do you explain AQI to a six-year-old who cannot go outside?
A practitioner's field guide to evaluation
A book-length version of the Measurement Checklist for people who commission or run evaluations in the development sector.
A Policy Grounds essay collection
Seventy essays from the Policy Grounds archive, selected and annotated.
Notes
Stuck to the wall for now.
51 short working notes on measurement, field practice, and what the data actually says. They are shuffled on each rebuild, and 8 of the 51 show at a time.
On recorded crime
NCRB counts crimes registered, not crimes committed. A higher figure can mean more crime, easier reporting, or both, so a state's rank on it says little about safety.
On the archive
When a country does not measure its own inequality, it has chosen not to know about it. That choice should be described as a choice.
On paper leaks
When a national exam paper leaks, the real failure is the design that had twenty-two lakh young people sit the same paper on the same morning. That design turns a single leak into a national crisis.
On the daily mailer
A daily deadline enforces the discipline that a weekly one only claims to have. What you write at 6am is the story you actually had, before there was time to revise it into something safer.
On writing
If a report needs a glossary, many readers will stop at the glossary. Write the glossary first, then write the report without using any of the words in it.
On incentives
A cash transfer changes behaviour for as long as the cash lasts. An incentive built into the welfare system changes behaviour for as long as the government stands.
On edtech
Free platforms reach more people, and paid platforms hold attention better. The choice should rest on which one a practitioner will actually open on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.
On measurement
The easiest number to count is often a poor guide to what is worth knowing. Much of good MEL work is setting aside the first question you are handed and asking a better one.
On disaggregation
Inequities hide inside an average improvement. An indicator that cannot be split by gender, caste and geography reports on a country that does not exist.
On reading aloud
Read a child the same book twice in one sitting. The second reading is the one that does the teaching.
On AI in MEL
AI will not save your evaluation. It will speed up the transcription of an interview you should not have run and produce a summary of evidence you did not want to read.
On anonymisation
A hand-drawn village map still identifies the village after the labels are removed, because the geometry stays. Decide first what to remove, then what to swap, and what must never be published.
On indicators
An indicator is a promise about what you will pay attention to. Choose only the ones you can afford to keep tracking.
On civic tech
A civic tool should be judged by the things its builders decide to refuse. Decide early what you will not build, even when you could.
On the electoral roll
The Special Intensive Revision asked people to prove they belonged on the roll with documents many poor citizens do not have. That reverses the presumption of inclusion the roll was built on.
On unpaid work
GDP counts the consultant who advises on a kitchen renovation and leaves out the woman who has cooked in that kitchen for forty years. The figure measures what the economy has agreed to notice.
On migration
In the lean season a bus ticket to the city works as a financial instrument. A family that cannot afford the fare stays poor until someone covers it.
On grantmaking
A grant is a bet on a person before it is a bet on a project. Fund the person who has the good question, even when someone else has the prettier logframe.
On theories of change
A Theory of Change is a hypothesis, and a team that tests it as one can learn from it. A team that treats it as a contract will spend its time defending it.
On Goodhart
The people whose work a metric measures can always game it. What matters is whether the gaming produces the underlying change or only the appearance of it.
On joy
If your instrument cannot measure joy in a classroom, the instrument needs more work. Keep working on it until it can.
On evidence
An RCT tells you something true about one moment, much as a photograph does. You cannot drive on it, cook with it or send a child to school on it.
On inequality
India has never run a national survey of household income, so its Gini is calculated from consumption, which understates the gap at the top. Until income is measured, nobody can say how unequal the country is.
On the youngest cohort
38 per cent of unmarried girls aged 15-19 place themselves at the very bottom of the life ladder, and 71 per cent still expect the next five years to improve. That hope does not last indefinitely, and a programme designed after it fades reaches the wrong cohort.
On failed payments
When authentication fails at a ration shop or a bank counter, the cost falls on the person in the queue, who comes back another day or goes without. A system that is free at the point of use should publish its failure rates and pay for a human fallback.
On voter rolls
Revising a voter roll is a political act. The names that drop out between two revisions are the finding, because nobody is counting them.
On protest archives
A public archive that claims certainty can be used against the people it records. An archive that says openly what it can and cannot verify, and puts the safety of contributors ahead of a complete record, acts as a witness to what happened.
On aspiration gaps
A small gap between what a woman wants and what she has can mean that she reached her aspiration or that the aspiration narrowed. One number cannot tell the two apart, so they have to be measured separately.
On reviewing
Most ToC reviews are friendly because the reviewer hopes to be invited back. The useful reviews are the ones where the reviewer raises the awkward point in the first half-hour.
On learning
A training has worked only if participants do something differently on the following Monday. If nothing changes in their work, the training was a performance.
On trials
A trial measures what reaches the field, so running one before delivery is stable can produce a null result that gets misread as the idea failing.
On building for one child
A learning platform built for one particular first-grader has design decisions that can all be defended, because every widget is there for a real reader who needed it. When strangers start using it, it is more honest than most platforms built for a market.
On caste in the data
Most household surveys treat caste as a control variable. When the research question is about caste, treating it as a control means refusing to look at the answer.
On withheld data
The 2017-18 consumption survey was conducted and never released, so the published interval between rounds is eleven years. Collecting a number and withholding it leaves the same gap in the public record as never collecting it.
On publishing
Voices at the margin stay there because the rooms are built too small for them. Publishing can make the room bigger.
On consulting
Most briefs ask for strategy, and many of them want somebody to blame later. Read the brief for the second need and price the work for the first.
On resilience
Resilience looks different in a Mumbai slum than in a Toronto suburb. A scale that cannot tell the two apart is measuring the assumptions of the people who wrote it.
On orders
In none of the 92 incidents has the archive found a written order authorising force. Every field without a source reads unknown, which makes the gaps visible.
On dashboards
A dashboard shows what a team has decided to notice. An honest dashboard also lists what the team has decided to leave out.
On final rolls
Twenty-four states have published final rolls. Against them the removals come to 8.87 crore, about 12 in every 100 electors, and those rolls grew by 1.22 crore names after their drafts. A draft figure and a final figure answer different questions, so a headline should say which one it quotes.
On power
Power shows up in who gets time on the calendar before it shows up in the budget. Read the calendar first.
On the census
Sixteen years without a census means ration entitlements and representation are still set on 2011 numbers. Every year of delay decides who gets counted for every scheme that uses them.
On the Budget
The speech gives the promise. The Revised Estimate for the year just ending shows what was spent. The gap between the two is where underspending shows.
On shipping fast
Some tools have to ship at the speed of the news cycle that created the need for them. A civic archive built in November for a protest that ended in July arrives after the placards are gone.
On data gaps
India has not conducted a census since 2011. Every policy decision that rests on that data is planning for a country that has since changed.
On pre-mortems
A pre-mortem asks how a project could fail before it has launched. Run it before the launch, because the likely cause of failure is usually already in the plan.
On field work
The farmer with the most grievances usually has the fewest ways to be heard. A sampling frame that only reaches people who are easy to talk to will miss that farmer.
On caste data
The last published caste enumeration was the 1931 census. The next count is in 2027, ninety-six years later.
On free frameworks
A free printable framework redistributes something of value. It lets a practitioner run, on a Friday afternoon, the audit she could not afford to commission.
On climate
The communities most at risk from climate change have the least data about it. The adaptation gap begins with the missing weather station.
On memory
Cardboard placards go into the rain and spray-paint is walked over by Monday, so what survives is what somebody decided to keep. Every archive takes a position on what the future will remember.
On rotation
What's feeding the work.
What is on the desk this month: some reading, something to watch and something to listen to. The list changes when something better turns up.
Reading
Books from the desk and the shelf behind it. The full list lives at /shelf.
The Idea of JusticeAmartya Sen · pluralist, comparative
Ideas of IndiaShruti Rajagopalan · Mercatus Center · long interviews with Indian scholars
About
Who is behind the work.
Varna Sri Raman has spent twenty years working where research, story and practice meet. She reads evidence for a living, and she reads most other things because she loves to.
Her questions keep returning to the same few. What are we measuring, and does it match what we mean? Whose voice frames the problem, and who has to live with the answer? Why do so many good reports end up on a shelf? Policy briefs rarely suit these questions, so she writes in whichever form does: essays, working papers, a dystopian novel, children's picture books, and a few longer books still in progress.
Writing is half of her work.
A good part of the rest comes back to Gandhi and nonviolence. She teaches ImpactMojo's open Gandhi curriculum, which includes Gandhi's Political Thought, Village Swaraj and the Economy of Permanence, and Nonviolence in Practice. In December 2025 she joined Ahimsa ke Raaste, a residential programme on Gandhian nonviolence at Wardha. She has also been part of a collective reading of Hind Swaraj (2025), the Aram, Auroville process "Mohandas Gandhi Refuses to Die" (2026), the JanaGanaMana Silsila Sangat series, and a residential satsang at Sambhaavnaa in June 2026. She also worked on relief and reconciliation after the Gujarat violence of 2002 with Harsh Mander and the Centre for Equity Studies, and during the Delhi violence of 2020 with Encompassion, a Nonviolent Communication organisation.
Varna is interested in building a new kind of politics for India.
Off the clock, she is a wife, daughter and sister in a loud, loving family, and mum to two sons. Two cats used to live here until they ran away for love. Before they left, they spent six months duping her by bringing lookalikes home at dinner time for the extra meal, an operation she respects. Heera the dog still lives here and is much loved. Her free time goes to books, watercolour painting, astrophysics rabbit holes and a lot of music, with mandolin, sitar and piano on the speakers and a guitar in her own hands (barely). When her projects allow, Varna can be found curled up by the window howling at the moon. She is a peaceful bibliophile until she meets a fascist.
04Non-fictionA Year of HavocA book-length record of the second COVID wave and what it did to Indian lives. Co-edited and co-authored.Oxfam India · 2022
Conversations about MEL consulting, research partnerships, civic technology and development education are welcome. The work usually starts with a question nobody has framed well yet and ends with something people can use 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.
