Tag: Voting

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

I still remember stepping into the One Stop Centre in Chhattisgarh. From the outside, it looked like any other government building, quiet, unremarkable, almost easy to miss. But the moment I crossed the gate, something shifted. The air felt heavier. The walls seemed to hold stories no dataset could ever capture.

Inside, I saw a woman lying motionless on a narrow bed in a small room that held three more. Her stillness stayed with me. I could sense that she had endured violence though no file or form could fully capture what her body and silence were already saying. Around her, life continued in fragments: paperwork being filled, voices lowering, footsteps moving past pain that had quietly become routine.

Just days earlier, I had been immersed in data, rows and columns collected from nearly 30 districts under the Government of India’s One Stop Centre scheme. I had analysed trends, built graphs, and drawn conclusions. On paper, the story seemed coherent, even orderly. But standing there, I realised how incomplete that story was.

At one desk, a staff member recorded cases in a worn-out register. With little training and even less context, complex human experiences were reduced to simple categories. A conflict between a mother and daughter became “domestic violence.” Not because it truly was but because the system allowed no other language.

In that moment, the gap between data and lived reality became impossible to ignore. The numbers I had trusted were not false but they were painfully insufficient.

This is why Whole Numbers and Half Truths by Rukmini S resonated so deeply with me. 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, rigor, 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.