Now
What I am
working on.
This page lists what I am working on, writing and reading this month. I update it by hand, more often than the blog.
Last updated: 7 October 2026
Actively working on
- Off the Roll, an analysis of the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls. By 30 September 2026 the draft rolls of 31 states and union territories had left off 13.39 crore names, about 14 in every 100 electors. Every state and territory in the revision now has a page, and in October I added a page on the National Register of Citizens built from primary documents only, an account of Assam's separate Special Revision, and downloadable workbooks for every place.
- Democracy by Design, the protest archive Pallavi Nayak and I started in July. Submissions are now reviewed every day, photographs are re-examined in batches, and three new essays went up in the first week of October.
- JanVayu has a Delhi page, and every claim it makes about the Graded Response Action Plan has been checked against the Commission for Air Quality Management's revised schedule and its 2026 orders. The docs are now in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and Tamil.
- With the India Institute, analysis support for a faculty-led study of caste, social capital and intergenerational mobility in rural South India, moving from the pilot to the larger survey in the same block.
- A Tamil Nadu government randomised trial of a critical thinking curriculum in government schools, where I am research adviser through the India Institute. It is still in the measurement and design stage.
- Designing the monitoring, evaluation and learning system for Claylab Education: the theory of change, the indicator framework and the data systems for learning outcomes.
- Primary research for the Development Intelligence Unit at Transform Rural India on livelihood aspirations, mobility and economic agency among women in rural and peri-urban India.
- The canvas suite: eighteen free one-page frameworks. Three went up in October: the Administrative List Test, the High-Frequency Check and Source Before You Say It.
- ImpactMojo added thirteen reading companions, four Field Radio videos and NFHS-6 figures in the first week of October, and every handout and practice pack has been through a second source check.
- StoryWell Books now has printable worksheets for members, starting with three Hindi sheets I reviewed myself.
- Phototales Studio added 130 photographs on 1 October. Every entry was checked against its picture and against sources, and each photograph now carries notes on how it was taken.
- LittleK and ALab, the Class 1 and Class 8 CBSE learning sites I built for my children.
Finished since August
- The baseline of an edtech efficacy study in mathematics in Mathura, for grades 1 to 5. The study continues.
- Fieldwork in Bangalore for the Discrimination and Development study with Bala, and the workshop with expert reviewers and staff of Christ University.
- The evaluation of interventions on violence against women across South Asia.
- Two monitoring and evaluation engagements, one in maternal and child health and one an end-of-programme evaluation using contribution analysis and outcome harvesting.
- A data project for a large national organisation that graded field observers and audited caste representation across more than 700 districts.
- A long case story from a visit to an alternative school in the Doon valley.
Writing
- The Measurement Trap is finished and in production with Routledge.
- The co-authored paper on whether the smartphone has replaced television as the medium that shifts rural women's gender attitudes is finished, and I am looking for the right journal.
- Essays on PolicyGrounds, seventy so far. The latest three are The Cockroaches Came Together on the student protests and the march on Parliament, Please Try Again on who pays when India's payment and identity systems fail, and The Epic Failure of the EPIC on the revision of the electoral rolls.
- The Hate Effect, still an outline.
- An essay on bringing up a child under air-quality advisories, not yet written down.
- On the blog, a methods note on how Off the Roll is built, alongside The two-hour archive on Democracy by Design and What the smartphone actually replaced on the three-generation media study.
Reading
- Slouching Towards Utopia by J. Bradford DeLong, on the twentieth century as a long, incomplete escape from scarcity.
- Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, on policy at Facebook from the inside.
- It Started with Words by Harsh Mander, on the epidemic of hate speech in India.
- Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra.
- A Life in Freedom, the memoir and prison diary of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit.
- Lords of the Deccan by Anirudh Kanisetti.
- Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein.
- The Bhagavadgita, in Bibek Debroy's translation.
- Poppies of Iraq by Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim.
- The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté.
- Murder, She Solved by R.D. Herring, a book of logic puzzles for the evenings.
- The 2026-27 Union Budget documents, slowly, with a red pen.
- Everything Katherine Boo has published, in rotation.
Saying no to
- Work that cannot name the person it is for.
- Anything called thought leadership that has no question attached to it.