In 2006, India accounted for 43% of the world's confirmed polio cases. • Barely 40% of rural households had electricity. • Only three in ten had a toilet. • Around 50,000 children were being paralysed every year. So India built a machine to solve an impending crisis. Coordination between the state, international agencies, and thousands of frontline workers. Yellow banners everywhere. House-to-house visits with marked doors. By 2014, India was polio-free. This is the story of how a nation built state capacity through a single disease, and the tensions that emerged along the way. It's not as simple as it sounds, as with all things in a country as diverse as India. Issue 6: How India Eradicated Polio: Inside the Nation's Largest Public Health Programme, written by @swatiSaxena1231, edited by @fahadmh, mobilized, mapped & built by @AltCarbonIndia altermag.com/articles/how-in…

🚨 Incredible news from the stables of @AlterMagIndia: Our very first piece, 'The Secret History of Indian SciFi, written by @gautambhatia88 has won the Ignyte awards for 'Outstanding Creative NonFiction' It's a seminal piece. Edited by @prempanicker altermag.com/articles/the-se…

Introducing @SwatiSaxena1231, author of Alter Magazine's Issue #6 on how India eradicated polio. Swati is a public health researcher interested in health systems, policy, vaccines, and cancer prevention. She has extensive fieldwork tracking the virus and monitoring its spread across Uttar Pradesh. When she isn't researching or writing, you'll find her reading crime thrillers or hunting for the next book for her two young children.

In 2004, India and Pakistan played a cricket series billed as the ‘Friendship Series’. Before the match began, the captains of both teams appeared together with a plea. It had nothing to do with cricket. What was it? (Answer in the end) We’re hosting a general knowledge quiz, moderated by @sparshselim , at @_lagrangepoint . Thank you, @itsarnavb . Alter Issue #6 launch date and time: 📅 6th September (Sunday) 🕐 2:00 PM 📍 Lagrange Point, Indiranagar RSVP: luma.com/3h3swr00 Answer: ‘Bowl’ out polio.

Glad to make this public! @AlterMagIndia has been generously backed by @tylercowen @srajagopalan @mercatus. We’re commissioning stories focusing on science, technology, & progress from South Asia. Here are a few stories we’d like written. My DMs are open for anyone interested. I find it remarkable that an org like Emergent Ventures exists. If you have a weird, oddball, ambitious idea you should apply to EV. The density of talent I have found surprises me everyday! altermag.com/pitch-us

It's heatwave season from Paris to Delhi. How do we design an ice cream for the gruelling, hotter than ever Indian Summers? @chandhana's fantastic piece looks at whether the innovation needs to happen in the cold chain (Unilever's ice cream freezers account for 10% of their supply chain emissions) or at the material level of creating a better designed ice cream. From Mughal bawarchis to Japanese scientists to kulfi makers of Chandni Chowk, this piece has it all. There's a fun easter egg hat tipping to mischievous turkish ice cream sellers as well! Read on about how Indian companies like Hocco, Arun Ice Creams, @Naturalicecream, NOTO are innovating to make your cup better. Kudos to @SauceVc @Manu_Chandra @chetanghodke_ for opening doors to make this piece even better.

An ice cream is a surprisingly elaborate piece of chemistry and physics. Contrary to its name, it isn't just frozen cream. It's four separate things held together at once: • ice crystals • a sugar syrup that never freezes • air folded in by churning, and • a network of fat holding it all Disturb any one of them and the whole thing collapses. In India, that collapse happens fast. So Indian manufacturers have started rebuilding ice cream from the inside out. Some are leaning on denser, mithai-style formulations for stability. Others are freezing the product only when it's served. A few are raising protein and prebiotic fibre levels, trading sugar and fat for structure, and a healthier ice cream in the bargain. This is the story that questions what an ice cream really is, and the strange science being used to combat a ₹10 vanilla cup that gives up by the sixth spoonful. Issue 5: Designing a Summer Ice Cream for India, written by @chandhana, edited by @fahadmh, scooped, churned & built by @AltCarbonIndia altermag.com/articles/design…

There is more history in an ice cream cone than you can possibly imagine. Empires built around it. Oceans crossed for it. An entire country's dairy industry reshaped by it. We spent months digging into all of it. Now we've turned it into a quiz. The Great Ice Cream Quiz — five rounds of questions that prove the most ordinary delights have the most extraordinary stories. 📅 Date: Tomorrow - 26th June 🕛 Time: 5-7pm 📍Venue: Art of Delight, Residency Road RSVP: luma.com/z19jbq5i

we're bringing @AlterMagIndia to san francisco! next week we're hosting some friends at an ice cream parlour to celebrate the launch of our latest issue written by @chandhana-- how to design an ice cream for the indian summers? join us for a fun evening delving into the present future history of ice creams, from Mughal kitchens to Turkish street corners to indian startups. partiful.com/e/A9ODh4qWH4uTN…?

Art of Delight has been making ice cream from scratch in Bangalore since 2016. Belgian couverture chocolate. Spanish cream cheese. Wayanad vanilla. Everything made from real ingredients, at 11 outlets across the city, scaled using technology across the supply chain. It felt like the right place to have a conversation about what great ice cream is actually made of. Alter Issue #5 Launch: 📅 Date: Friday, 26th June 🕛 Time: 5-7pm 📍Venue: Art of Delight, Residency Road RSVP link: luma.com/z19jbq5i

Introducing @chandhana, author of Alter Magazine’s Issue #5 on how to design a summer ice cream for India. Chandhana’s distaste for chocolate and an early introduction to Adam Smith’s pin factory sent her down the rabbit holes of supply chains and food science. What began as curiosity has since become a hobby: understanding the chemical levers that shape how we experience food. She grew up in Chennai, where she spent many summers watching ice cream melt a little too quickly. 📅 Date: Friday, 26th June 🕛 Time: 5-7pm 📍 Venue: Art of Delight, Residency Road RSVP: luma.com/z19jbq5i

If you’re in Bangalore attend the launch of @chandhana’s cracker of a piece on Indian ice creams. Put together expertly by the @AlterMagIndia team.

We’re looking for a writer to profile Radhanath Sikdar — the Bengali mathematician who computed the height of the world’s tallest peak from a desk in Dehradun, 800 miles from the mountain. Sikdar was a product of Hindu College and the Young Bengal ferment — Derozio’s radicals, rationalists barely out of their teens, remaking what it meant to think in 1830s Calcutta. He caught the attention of George Everest, and was absorbed into the Great Trigonometric Survey: the most ambitious measurement project the British Empire ever attempted, a decades-long effort to triangulate the entire subcontinent. In 1852, Sikdar ran the numbers on Peak XV. Without ever having visited the peak himself, he calculated the true heigh to near precision— a feat of the human mind. The story of Sikdar represents the tale of Indian Exceptionalism. We’re looking to commission more stories about Indian geniuses, & forgotten institutions. Stories we want to commission: altermag.com/pitch-us

In 1939, Jawaharlal Nehru visited Rabindranath Tagore to ask if Jana Gana Mana could become India's national anthem. A statistician was in the room. That statistician, P.C. Mahalanobis, would go on to build the system that let a newly independent nation of 350 million people see itself clearly for the first time. In 1950, nobody knew what the average Indian ate. Or earned. Or whether they had work. Policy ran on guesswork. Mahalanobis changed that. He built the National Sample Survey, which knocked on thousands of doors and asked, item by item: what did you eat last month? Rice, dal, cooking oil, fuel, clothing. Harold Hotelling, then among the foremost statisticians in the world, wrote that no sampling technique developed anywhere could "compare in accuracy" with what Mahalanobis had built. This is the story of how India built, then lost, and is slowly rebuilding the infrastructure of national self-knowledge. Issue 4: The Making of Indian Statistics, written by @jainhiya_ , designed & built by @AltCarbonIndia altermag.com/articles/the-ma…

They named it after one of the oldest universities in the world. Their library now holds 3,000+ books on defence, economics, history, foreign policy, and more. One of their Co-Founders is now India's Chief Economic Adviser. Alter #4 launches at @TakshashilaInst, one of India's foremost public policy think tanks, founded in mid-2009 as an independent, non-partisan institution conducting research and offering courses on public policy. It is a fitting venue for a piece about what it takes to build institutions that last. Tomorrow. luma.com/bgo9bzaz

Narayan Ramachandran is Co-Founder and Senior Fellow at the Takshashila Institution, one of India's foremost public policy think tanks and the home of Alter #4's launch. He has spent his career shaping the systems that move capital, talent, and ideas. Before Takshashila, he ran Global Emerging Markets at Morgan Stanley, chaired RBL Bank, and now chairs TeamLease Services and Vivriti Asset Management, while co-chairing Unitus Capital, India's largest social enterprise bank. He writes A Visible Hand, a fortnightly column for @livemint. It's a fitting frame for the panel at Alter #4, he joins @pramit_b and moderator @jainhiya_ on the evening of May 22nd. luma.com/bgo9bzaz

Pramit Bhattacharya has spent years decoding the numbers through which India sees itself. As research lead at @dataforin, columnist at @htTweets, and former Data Editor at @livemint, @pramit_b has built a career around making public data clearer, sharper, and harder to ignore. He helped set up Plain Facts, one of India’s first data journalism units, and is currently working on a book on the evolution of national accounting in India. For Alter Magazine's Issue #4, he joins us to explore Mahalanobis, the Indian Statistical Institute, and the story of how modern India learnt to see itself through data. luma.com/bgo9bzaz

A forgotten dataset. A flawed survey. A number that changed policy. A method that shouldn't have worked but did. If you have insights on any of the above, sign up to give a 5 min lightning talk at the launch of @AlterMagIndia's Issue #4! luma.com/bgo9bzaz