Category: Campaigns

  • Of absurd letters and misplaced priorities

    It is not too rare to see very bizarre letters. In fact, there have been letters unearthed from over 2000 years ago from the dawn of writing itself often written by people who wanted to complain about services or to authorities. More recent funny letter compilations abound on the Internet, many of them quite lame leave letters supposedly written…

  • Open government (data)

    Comment is free, but facts are sacred Thanks to the exceedingly good central government run website to file applications under the Right to Information Act (see end of this post for details), I got the opportunity to look at some useful data on implementation of large nationwide schemes. I have been trying to obtain data…

  • Afrindian Mammals

    I just came across a recent book on Indian mammals. Congratulations to the authors (M. S. Pradhan, S. S. Talmale), both from the prestigious Zoological Survey of India. I, for one would have bought it, if not for its fairly expensive pricing. It is priced at 4500. I hope, that by now, the authors have…

  • Counting system losing count

    In continuation of a campaign to free public data (and potentially public data), this opinion piece published in Business Standard on 21 Jan 2014. Also see similar advocacy articles on public data across health and natural history. More to follow… In 1921, laying the foundation for a leading newspaper’s entry into data journalism, its editor C…

  • Can we count on our counting systems?

    A shorter version of this article appeared on BMJ Blogs on October 31, 2013 under the same title.  Co-written with Himabindu G L of IPH, Bangalore. Much of the material remains unprocessed, or, if processed, unanalysed, or, if analysed, not read, or, if read, not used or acted upon Robert Chambers Basic demographic information forms…