Rukmini S@Rukmini

Knowledge from data for everyone. Founder, @dataforin. Book: "Whole Numbers & Half Truths" (Westland '21).

 Chennai, India
dataforindia.com
Joined July 2011
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Rukmini S retweeted
Data For India
@dataforin
21h
In 1950, a child born in India could expect to live only until the age of 41. By 2024, life expectancy at birth in India had risen to 72 years. Life expectancy is the average number of years a person would live if they were exposed to the sex- and age-specific death rates prevailing at that time. This data for India and other countries comes from the World Population Prospects, 2024 Revision, published by the United Nations Population Division. Across the world, women tend to live longer than men owing to a combination of biological and social factors. Girls are more likely to survive infancy and early childhood, while men are more likely to die from accidents in young adulthood and non-communicable diseases in old age, partly because of differences in health behaviours. However, this global trend did not hold true in India in the first few decades of Independence. In the 1950s, Indian men lived longer than women. That male advantage was reversed only in the early 1980s. By 2024, a newborn girl could expect to live more than three years longer than a boy born in the same year. This female advantage is large and well established only in India’s richer states. In poorer states, it is smaller and more recent. #LifeExpectancy #Ageing #Population #India #DataForIndia
Title: The female advantage in life expectancy in India appeared only in the 1980s Sub-title: Life expectancy at birth in India by gender, 1950–2024 Explanation: Life expectancy rose substantially for both women and men, from about 41 years in 1950 to 74 years for women and 71 years for men in 2024. Men had a slightly higher life expectancy until the early 1980s, when women overtook them. The female advantage then widened, reaching more than three years by 2024. Both groups experienced a sharp temporary decline around the COVID-19 pandemic. Source: World Population Prospects, United Nations Population Division Attribution: Data For India | CC BY

ALT Title: The female advantage in life expectancy in India appeared only in the 1980s Sub-title: Life expectancy at birth in India by gender, 1950–2024 Explanation: Life expectancy rose substantially for both women and men, from about 41 years in 1950 to 74 years for women and 71 years for men in 2024. Men had a slightly higher life expectancy until the early 1980s, when women overtook them. The female advantage then widened, reaching more than three years by 2024. Both groups experienced a sharp temporary decline around the COVID-19 pandemic. Source: World Population Prospects, United Nations Population Division Attribution: Data For India | CC BY

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Rukmini S retweeted
Data For India
@dataforin
Sep 24
We are heading to IndiaFOSS 2026 this weekend! September 26–27 at NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bengaluru. @nileena_suresh Suresh and @TheDataAreClean from Data For India will host a hands-on booth to showcase our work on “the last mile of public data”. Together, we will explore what stands between data being publicly available and being genuinely usable. Come meet us on the 1st floor! Also at IndiaFOSS, @Rukmini will speak about "Telling India’s Story Through Data" on Sunday, September 27, at 11:45 am in Hall 1. Register here: fossunited.org/indiafoss/202… #OpenData #PublicData #OpenSource #FOSS #DataForIndia
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New on @dataforin: the conversation about India's Gen Z misses, in my view, a sense of what an unusual moment this is, demographically. This is just not, any more, a country where being young means being at the crest of a great wave. dataforindia.com/indias-gen-…

India's Gen Z is a shrinking demographic

With falling fertility, India's generational cohorts are experiencing a fundamental realignment. Younger cohorts are no longer dominant in size, and are increasingly squeezed by older cohorts.

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By population projections, India's youth population will begin to fall in absolute numbers for the first time in its history. This is a fundamental realignment of India's population structure, the next stage after falling fertility.
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All of this is profoundly different from how India has looked, historically, and what being young has meant. It should factored into our understanding of Gen Z, Gen Alpha and the generations beyond. Read more here: dataforindia.com/indias-gen-…

India's Gen Z is a shrinking demographic

With falling fertility, India's generational cohorts are experiencing a fundamental realignment. Younger cohorts are no longer dominant in size, and are increasingly squeezed by older cohorts.

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Rukmini S retweeted
Data For India
@dataforin
Sep 21
Six in ten workers in India are self-employed, making up the largest category of workers. India's labour statistics define the self-employed as persons who operate their own farm or non-farm enterprise, or are engaged independently in a profession or trade on their own, or with one or a few partners in household enterprises. Unlike salaried and casual workers, the self-employed are not paid wages, but their earnings come from the profits of the enterprise. Workers with lower levels of education are much more likely to be self-employed, while those with a higher education are more likely to be in salaried work. Among workers who have a higher education, 40% are in self-employment, while nearly 60% are in salaried work. Among illiterate workers, on the other hand, 66% are self-employed while just 7% are in salaried work. Self-employed people may be own-account workers who run their own enterprise without employees, employers who run the enterprise by hiring paid employees, or unpaid helpers who work in a household enterprise for no wages. #Employment #SelfEmployment #Work #India #DataForIndia
Title: The less educated are more likely to be self-employed in India Sub-title: Type of employment, by education level (2024) Explanation: Self-employment becomes less common as education levels rise, falling from 66% among illiterate workers to 40% among workers with higher education. Salaried work shows the opposite pattern, rising from about 7% among illiterate workers to 58% among those with higher education. Casual work also declines sharply, from 28% to about 2%. Source: Periodic Labour Force Survey, National Statistics Office Attribution: Data For India | CC BY

ALT Title: The less educated are more likely to be self-employed in India Sub-title: Type of employment, by education level (2024) Explanation: Self-employment becomes less common as education levels rise, falling from 66% among illiterate workers to 40% among workers with higher education. Salaried work shows the opposite pattern, rising from about 7% among illiterate workers to 58% among those with higher education. Casual work also declines sharply, from 28% to about 2%. Source: Periodic Labour Force Survey, National Statistics Office Attribution: Data For India | CC BY

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Extremely important research by my colleague Ameya Bokil. India's overall incarceration rate is low, but not when you look at specific groups.
Data For India
@dataforin
Sep 18
New Data Byte: One in every 250 young men in Punjab and Delhi is in prison, by Ameya Bokil The incarceration rate - the number of people in prisons for every 100,000 persons - is an important measure of a country's socio-economic environment, and criminal and justice systems. India's incarceration rate of around 40 persons in jail for every 100,000 residents is one of the lowest in the world. However national averages hide high incarceration rates among some groups in particular. The incarceration rate for men, and for young men in particular, is much higher. The incarceration rate for men aged 18-30 years is over three times the national average. It is also significantly higher in some states in particular. Punjab has India's highest incarceration rate, led to a large extent by charges under anti-narcotics laws. Young men in the 18-30 age group in Punjab and Delhi are ten times more likely to be in prison than an average person in the country. With an incarceration rate of over 400, over one in every 250 young men in these two states is in prison. For context, the United States of America, which has among the highest incarceration rates in the world, had 520 people in prison for every 100,000 residents in 2023. A large number of those in prison are undertrials. 85% of the incarcerated young men in Punjab's jails and 96% in Delhi's jails were undertrials, meaning that they were awaiting completion of their trial and had yet to be convicted of an offence. #Prison #Jail #Inmates #Law #India #DataForIndia
Title: Incarceration rate among men aged 18–30 years, 2023 Sub-title: One in every 250 young men in Punjab and Delhi is in prison Explanation: In 2023, 144 of every 100,000 men aged 18–30 in India were in prison. The rate was nearly three times as high in Punjab and Delhi, at 418 and 423 per 100,000 respectively. This means roughly one in every 250 young men in these two states was incarcerated. Source: Prison Statistics India, National Crime Records Bureau Attribution: Data For India | CC BY

ALT Title: Incarceration rate among men aged 18–30 years, 2023 Sub-title: One in every 250 young men in Punjab and Delhi is in prison Explanation: In 2023, 144 of every 100,000 men aged 18–30 in India were in prison. The rate was nearly three times as high in Punjab and Delhi, at 418 and 423 per 100,000 respectively. This means roughly one in every 250 young men in these two states was incarcerated. Source: Prison Statistics India, National Crime Records Bureau Attribution: Data For India | CC BY
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🧵New on @dataforin: we use data to derive insights about India, but we're also big on researching and writing about these datasets for the benefit of other researchers who may want to use them. The latest in this series is our research on e-courts data dataforindia.com/e-courts-da…

Using India's e-courts data to answer questions around access to justice

The e-courts database has become an important repository of India's judicial data, and has opened up possibilities of deep empirical research. We describe the dataset, explore what can be done using...

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However, there are significant challenges in using the data, and our legal researcher and writer Ameya Bokil both lists and explains these, as caution for others who may want to use this database dataforindia.com/e-courts-da…

Using India's e-courts data to answer questions around access to justice

The e-courts database has become an important repository of India's judicial data, and has opened up possibilities of deep empirical research. We describe the dataset, explore what can be done using...

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We look forward to more work using e-ecourts data, but also hope that our work helps researchers be aware of the pitfalls of the data that they are getting into. Let's make this sort of research data commons as well! (Thread ends)
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Rukmini S retweeted
Data For India
@dataforin
Sep 14
When a country’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) drops to 2.1 children per woman, demographers say it has reached “replacement fertility”. This is a key milestone for a country, indicating that the population will eventually stop growing and replace itself. If fertility falls further, the population will decline in absolute numbers over time. India's fertility rate has dropped to 1.9 children per woman as of 2023. In the global conversation around falling birth rates, choices made by women around education and work are usually seen as the leading cause. However India shows that this theory does not hold universally.    In North America, Europe and East Asia, falling fertility could in part be explained by the opportunity costs faced by women who leave the workforce to have children. But most adult women in India do not work for pay outside the home. Yet India’s birth rate is now comparable to Viet Nam’s, where the labour force participation rate for women is two times that of India. The age at which women have their children is also lower in India than in East Asia, North America or Europe, meaning that women delaying childbirth for their careers is also not an explanation for falling fertility here.  In their 2025 book, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People, economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso argue against a grand theory for this trend. Instead, they suggest that many types of improvements in people’s lives have raised the opportunity cost of having children. These may include economic opportunities, but they may also include more leisure, and more ways to spend one’s time.  #Fertility #Births #Population #India #DataForIndia
Title: The share of women in the labour force is more than twice as high in Viet Nam as in India, yet fertility rates are similar Sub-title: Fertility rate and female labour force participation, by country (2022) Explanation: In 2022, 76% of women in Viet Nam were in the labour force, compared with 32% in India. Despite this large difference, both countries had a total fertility rate of about 1.9 children per woman. Source: World Development Indicators, World Bank Attribution: Data For India | CC BY

ALT Title: The share of women in the labour force is more than twice as high in Viet Nam as in India, yet fertility rates are similar Sub-title: Fertility rate and female labour force participation, by country (2022) Explanation: In 2022, 76% of women in Viet Nam were in the labour force, compared with 32% in India. Despite this large difference, both countries had a total fertility rate of about 1.9 children per woman. Source: World Development Indicators, World Bank Attribution: Data For India | CC BY

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Happy Ganesh chaturthi, and may a love that demolishes our modaks and does not remark upon their highly indelicate looks find us all.
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Rukmini S retweeted
Data For India
@dataforin
Sep 4
New Data Byte: More pre-teens in India have used the internet than people in their 40s, by @akwaghmare Internet usage in India is heavily concentrated among younger people. Of the 60% of Indians who had used the internet as of 2025, most are in their teens and twenties. Internet usage among people in their thirties and forties, on the other hand, is much lower. Fewer than half of people in their 50s, and fewer than a quarter of people over the age of 60 use the internet. In contrast, nearly all Indians in their late teens and in their twenties use the internet.  This data comes from the Comprehensive Modular Survey - Telecom, a nationally representative survey conducted by India's National Statistics Office. The survey asked people who reported they had used a phone or a computer whether they were able to use the internet, and whether they had used the internet at least once in the three months preceding the survey. A substantial number of children have also used the internet. More than half of children between five and nine years of age (54%) reported having used the internet at least once in the three months preceding the survey. Children between five and nine years of age are more likely to have used the internet than people in their fifties. Access to the internet increased sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly among children and teenagers, likely as a result of lockdowns and online schooling.  #Internet #Teenagers #LivingConditions #India #DataForIndia
Title: Internet usage by age (2025) Sub-title: More pre-teens in India have used the internet than people in their 40s Explanation: Internet use rises sharply with age among children, from 8% of those aged 0–4 to 54% of those aged 5–9 and 81% of those aged 10–14. It peaks at 94% among both 15–19- and 20–29-year-olds, then falls steadily with age: 85% for ages 30–39, 65% for 40–49, 43% for 50–59, and 23% for people aged 60 and above. Source: Comprehensive Modular Survey - Telecom, National Statistics Office Attribution: Data For India | CC BY

ALT Title: Internet usage by age (2025) Sub-title: More pre-teens in India have used the internet than people in their 40s Explanation: Internet use rises sharply with age among children, from 8% of those aged 0–4 to 54% of those aged 5–9 and 81% of those aged 10–14. It peaks at 94% among both 15–19- and 20–29-year-olds, then falls steadily with age: 85% for ages 30–39, 65% for 40–49, 43% for 50–59, and 23% for people aged 60 and above. Source: Comprehensive Modular Survey - Telecom, National Statistics Office Attribution: Data For India | CC BY

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🧵 New on @dataforin: that India is warming is now well known (read our work on this here: dataforindia.com/temperature…). But this change is neither geographically nor seasonally uniform.

Temperature trends in India

Long-term temperature trends provide a clear view of a changing climate. Using historical and present-day data for India, this piece charts the rise in absolute and relative temperature in India, and...

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While winter shows the most widespread spatial warming, she finds that the monsoon season shows the clearest evidence of sustained long-term warming relative to the baseline
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Read @dataforin's work on regional trends in seasonal temperature change here dataforindia.com/regional-va…

Regional variations in seasonal temperatures

India is warming, but the magnitude of this warming varies widely by season and geography. Winter sees the most uniform warming across the country, while the monsoon shows the clearest evidence of...

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