Hello and welcome to more or less, with a programme that champions the power of numbers

to explain their vast complexity found in every corner of the world. And today we are

examining one of the most vast and most complex nations on earth, India, homes who are around

1.4 billion people. Understanding the state of this diverse nation is no easy to ask, but

the data journalist Rukhmi Es has spent her career trying to get to grips with India

through numbers. In fact, she's written a book about it, whole numbers and half truths.

What data can and cannot tell us about modern India? I started by asking her whether

there was anything about India that made it particularly hard to understand through statistics.

I think on the face of it, it can seem like that because of India's size, but one of the

things that India really has going for it is pretty impressive statistical architecture

that was put in place at its founding moment at the time of independence. And that architecture

has held quite strong despite political onslaughts and other pressures over the years.

One of the biggest challenges is people are extremely different and different in very

fundamental and important ways in ways that have an impact on their lived realities, on

their experience of the world, on their incomes, on their levels of education, on their

outlook towards life. One of the most important cleavages in Indian society is divisions along

caste and the enduring impact of caste, even though many people like to believe that there

is no place for caste in modern developing India. So what this means is that to conduct

a sample survey at a size and scale and represent it as a miss that you need to say something

truly useful about India tends to be so expensive that it's really a undertaking that's only

taken on by government. That, as you say, is where government has to take a role, but then

with government comes politics. I know there's been a recent argument about really one of

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