The blog
Reflections from
the practice.
Medium-length pieces on measurement, field practice, parenting and the questions that remain after the project report is filed. Longer evidence-based writing on current policy issues is published at Policy Grounds Press. A daily selection of research, with a weekly round-up, goes out as the Research Rundown.
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How Off the Roll is built
A methods note on Off the Roll, the analysis of the Special Intensive Revision of India's electoral rolls. Where each figure comes from, how the tables are checked, and what the lists cannot tell us.
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The two-hour archive
How Democracy by Design got built. A note on what a protest archive needs to refuse, why it had to ship in an afternoon, and what happens to protest art after the crowds go home.
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The observer files a report
A national organisation sends observers to grade its own district units. We turned the paperwork into a monthly score across 23 states. This is what the data caught, and what it made the party look at.
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What the smartphone actually replaced
Twenty years ago, cable television arriving in a village tracked shifts in son preference and attitudes to wife-beating. A three-generation household pilot suggests the signal has moved.
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Before you evaluate a curriculum, fix the construct
A state government commissioned an RCT of a critical thinking curriculum. Designing the trial is straightforward. Deciding what it measures is harder.
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What the hand-drawn map carries
A field researcher's sketch map is useful for analysis and unpublishable as drawn. On the pipeline that removes the village without removing the geography.
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The number, the testimony, and the AQI you can act on
JanVayu now has an AI assistant. It answers a kind of question the sensor cannot answer alone, and it makes an argument about what measurement is for.
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The canvas suite as a practice
On why eight free, printable, one-page frameworks add up to a way of working.
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The pre-mortem and the bottom row
On the two quadrants of the Rumsfeld matrix that most programmes pretend do not exist, and the meeting that gets them onto the page.
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Two five-letter frameworks for the bit before the dashboard
On CLEAR (for the pathway) and VALID (for the indicator), two reviewer's checklists to apply before the logframe gets signed.
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School vouchers in Old Delhi: India's first education RCT for girls
In 2010, we gave families in Old Delhi vouchers for private school fees to test whether cost was the barrier to girls' enrolment. The answer went beyond the voucher.
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Before climate had a budget line
In 2014, we built media programming to prepare coastal communities for cyclones. We called it disaster response. Now we would call it climate adaptation. The communities already knew.
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When the phone rings at the right week
An automated phone call service delivered health information to millions of pregnant women across Indian states, timed to the week of pregnancy and recorded in their own language.
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The district as a unit of change
States are too large for programme managers to act on, and villages are too small for funders to fund. Governance happens at the district, and health programmes should be designed to land there.
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Measuring joy in a classroom
When you put art in a government school, how do you evaluate what it does to the children? The standard instruments fail. We tried anyway.
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A bus ticket as a financial instrument
In rural Bangladesh and India, seasonal poverty persists because families cannot afford the bus fare to a city where work exists. An RCT showed that a small travel subsidy makes a large difference.
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The card in her hand
A deck of illustrated cards and a phone number changed what frontline health workers in Bihar said to new mothers, in millions of households. It worked because people trusted the card and the voice on the phone.
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What counts as impact in edtech?
When every edtech product defines impact differently, funders and schools have no way to compare them. A note on building a common framework for a sector that resists one.
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Notes on why the book is about measurement
A short explanation of why we are spending the next few years writing The Measurement Trap.
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When district data is all you have
In a country where the census has not been updated since 2011, how do you estimate what is happening at the block level? A note on small-area estimation and the politics of granularity.
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What a girls' collective taught us about agency
In 2009, a school-based girls' collective in rural India started delaying child marriages. The mechanism was simpler and more radical than anyone expected.
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