Tag: books

Data doesn’t always tell the truth

In God we trust, all others must bring data”- Edwards Dening

Before reviewing this eye opening book, I want to share a personal experience that shaped how I understand data and its limitations. 

While working with the Government of Chhattisgarh, I was tasked with analysing data collected under the One Stop Centre scheme launched by the Government of India in 2015 to provide integrated support to women. The task was far from simple. At the time, there were around 30 districts, so I had to reach out individually to each district coordinator to collect raw data.  After multiple follow- ups, the data finally arrived, fragmented, inconsistent, and often poorly recorded. 

After days of cleaning, segregating, and analysing the data, I prepared a detailed report with insights, graphs, and recommendations.The Secretary of the Ministry of Women and Child Development appreciated the effort but insisted that I visit a few One Stop Centres myself to truly understand the reality on the ground. 

That visit changed everything. 

At one centre, I saw a torn register used to record cases. The person documenting them had limited understanding of the nature or severity of the issues. As a result, most cases were categorised as domestic violence, not because that reflected reality, but because it was the easiest label to use. For example, even a disagreement between a mother and a daughter was recorded under the same category. That is when I realised why my data analysis had been misleading. The numbers were accurate on paper but deeply flawed in context. 

This is precisely what Rukmani S highlights in Whole Numbers and Half Truths. The book articulates what I witnessed firsthand: that data, when stripped of context, empathy, and social understanding, can flatten human lives into misleading conclusions.

Through rigorous research and storytelling, she explores how India really lives, votes, believes, earns, spends, and survives. She examines how the law works in practice, how society functions beneath the surface, and how data when stripped of context can distort reality rather than illuminate it.

The book powerfully challenges dominant narratives often circulated on WhatsApp forwards and casual public discourse. Its most important takeaway is this: data cannot be read in isolation. It must be understood within social, cultural, and political contexts, while also accounting for cognitive biases, both of those collecting the data and those interpreting it.

Rukmini S shows how stories derived from data often reflect the storyteller’s own privileges, frequently reinforcing upper-caste, cisgender, heteronormative perspectives while erasing lived realities at the margins.

Some key insights from the book include: 

  1. Many reported cases involve consenting adults, often linked to inter-caste or inter-religious relationships. 
  2. Indians remain socially conservative, even when they claim otherwise.  
  3. Caste continues to deeply shape social relations and opportunities. 
  4. Marriage within caste remains dominant. 
  5. Women’s participation in the workforce remains low, even among the educated. 
  6. Voting behaviour is complex, polarised yet deeply pragmatic. 
  7. Youth-led change exists but largely at the margins; traditions still dominate everyday life.
  8. Education and employment outcomes are shaped by structural privilege and oppression.
  9. Class, caste, and religion intersect in deeply entrenched ways.
  10. Rural households spend more on cereals, while urban households spend more on eating out.
  11. Indian workers clock some of the longest working hours globally.
  12. Urban women most commonly work as domestic workers, while men dominate construction work.
  13. Son preference continues despite declining fertility rates.
  14. India is less urban than commonly assumed, and migration is slower and more localised than popular narratives suggest.
  15. Access to healthcare is deeply unequal, with poorer households often taking loans for medical treatment.

Together, these insights challenge the simplified narratives that dominate public discourse. More importantly, the book urges us to question not just what data tells us, but how it is collected, interpreted, and used. Ultimately, Whole Number and Half Truths is a call for humility, rigour, and honesty in how we engage with numbers. It reminds us that data can illuminate reality but only when paired with context, empathy, and critical thinking.

How to get things right?

Checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced against failure in many more tasks than we realized. They provide a kind of cognitive net. They catch mental flaws inherent in all of us-flaws of memory, attention and thoroughness.”

Excerpt from the Book

It’s been more than two years since I started making a to-do list every day. And I am still doing it. It not only helped me plan my day but also made me efficient. The question here is whether a simple to-do list would be really helpful in getting things right. The book I am going to discuss says so. In fact, I was a little skeptical, thinking that it’s more than obvious that a to-do list works; why would someone write a book on it? But this book really makes sense by taking the reader through the evolution of checklists.

To err is to be human. We have all heard this multiple times. In fact, it has been estimated that one of the greatest contributors to accidents is human error in any industry. Perrow found that, on average, 60–80 percent of accidents involve human error. Errors in some fields can be overlooked but not every profession can take the risk of even making a tiny error or overlooking the smallest step. Because a small error in the medical field will cost someone their life. In today’s newspaper, I saw this story where a woman was given blood from the wrong group, leading to the deterioration of her health. How grave is this error? There can never be any justification for it. A small error led to the failure of India’s Chandrayan-2 mission, as we all remember.

Do we know how we can make things right? Do we have the capability and capacity to make things right all the time? How do we deal with extreme complexity of the modern world? Why do we make small errors, and how can we avoid them? Is it possible to be 100% accurate?

Atul Gwanade, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, suggests in his book titled ‘The Checklist Manifesto’ the simplest solution anyone can think of. A checklist can help us manage the extreme complexity of the modern world. A detailed checklist acts as protection against the failure of the human mind, memory, and attention. It increases the success rate. According to him, failure results not so much from ignorance (not knowing enough about what works) as from ineptitude (not properly applying what we know works). That’s where a simple checklist comes into picture.

So, the important question we need to ask here is : why should a common person be aware of this method of checklist? It’s because this is not only useful in the medical field but also in other activities that are sometimes mundane and repetitive but also crucial not to be overlooked. The author provides examples of checklist successes in other diverse fields, such as aviation, investment banking, skyscraper construction, and businesses of all kinds.

The author differentiates between good and bad checklists too.

The author mentions three characteristics that are part of the code of conduct of any profession, the expectation of selflessness, skill and trust-worthiness along with discipline. Discipline is the hardest to develop because human beings are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. And checklists can help inculcating discipline in the people, adds Gawande.

In the end, he also urges the users to keep refining these checklists to make them work as per changing circumstances and time.

In an age of unremitting technological complexity, where the most basic steps are too easy to overlook and where overlooking even one step can have irremediable consequences, something as primitive as writing down a to-do list to “get the stupid stuff right” can make a profound difference.

Do you create a checklist for anything in your personal or professional life? If yes, do let me know in the comment box. Also, if you liked reading this post and gained something from it, please buy me a coffee by clicking the link below:

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