Deep-dive, interactive summaries of essential texts in development economics, data visualisation, productivity, and public policy. Navigate chapters, explore key concepts, and build real understanding.
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Becker, an orthopedic surgeon and researcher at the Veterans Administration hospital in Syracuse, spent nearly thirty years arguing that modern medicine took a wrong turn when it defined…
Cognitive Load Theory in Practice: Examples for the Classroom is a practitioner guide published in November 2018 by the Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation (CESE) within the NSW…
Chakravorty argues that the fantasy, nonsense and romance written in Bengali during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — long dismissed as frivolous children's fare, humour…
First Helpings is a social history of children and food, focused primarily on Britain from the medieval period to today.
Gene Sharp's central claim is deceptively simple: dictators are not omnipotent. Every regime, however brutal, depends on the continuous cooperation, obedience, and submission of the…
Kerala is India's showcase for what an organised Left can achieve: the world's first democratically elected communist government (1957), the highest literacy, the most effective welfare…
Iftekhar Iqbal reframes six great Tibetan-sourced rivers — the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Red, and Yangzi (which he groups as BISMRY) — not as tools of empire but as active…
The Science of Learning distils the cognitive-science research on how students learn into six questions that Deans for Impact argues every teacher-candidate should be able to answer: how…
Positive psychology, defined here as "the scientific study of optimal human functioning," argues that a full picture of the mind requires studying human strengths, not just deficits and…
This short essay — drawn from Gene Sharp's magnum opus 'The Politics of Nonviolent Action' (1973) and widely reprinted in Colman McCarthy's 'The Class of Nonviolence' — compresses Sharp's…
This is a short, practitioner-facing eBook (about 16 pages) that distils the cognitive science of learning into one usable mental model for teachers.
Walking with the Comrades collects three long essays that Arundhati Roy first published in Outlook magazine between 2009 and 2010 — 'Mr Chidambaram's War', the title piece 'Walking with the…
This is a peer-reviewed methods paper, not a book — an ORIGINAL PAPER in the Springer journal Health and Technology (2026, vol. 16, pp.
This is not a history of India but a history of how Indians have argued over, contested and reimagined history itself.
An interactive companion to the feature that asks a question sixty years of literary theory told us to ignore — who, or what, actually wrote this? — and traces how AI has forced readers, teachers and…
An interactive companion to Parama Roy's essay on how food and cookbooks — above all Madhur Jaffrey's — become the trope through which the South Asian diaspora writes class, gender, nostalgia and…
An interactive companion to WHO's practical, checklist-driven guide for countries building a health technology assessment mechanism — the institution that decides, fairly and transparently, which…
An interactive companion to a short, provocative book that reads Marx's Capital forwards into the age of AI — asking not whether robots will replace workers, but whether they could ever become…
An interactive companion to the World Bank's five-step framework for deciding whether a digital health intervention is worth the money — before a cash-strapped health system scales it up.
An interactive companion to Azim Premji University's decade of reflection on how you teach development to a diverse cohort — where pedagogy is treated not as classroom technique but as intent, and…
An interactive companion to the WHO's five-step, six-domain method for deciding which medical technologies are actually fit for low-resource health systems — and how a ministry of health could…
An interactive companion to a study that turns a plain question — can you actually trust the numbers in India's gender and child budgets? — into a six-part quality test for every state's statement.
An interactive companion to a difference-in-differences study asking whether Indian states that genuinely practice gender budgeting outperform those that do not — and where the gains stop at the wall…
A navigational companion to the field-defining reference work — 771 entries by 874 authors — that maps tourism as both a multidisciplinary field of study and a multi-sector industry, and hands…
A study companion to the standard reference on the Indian Constitution and political system — how the Constitution was made, what makes it distinctive, and the institutions it builds — read for…
An interactive companion to the meeting-science playbook that argues the hybrid meeting — part in-room, part on-screen — is not a compromise to endure but a modality to master, if you build it around…
An interactive companion to the trade book that argues our obsession with busyness — not laziness — is the great unspoken sickness of the modern workplace, and offers a brain-science toolkit to…
An interactive companion to Don Norman's foundational text on human-centered design — the book that taught a generation to blame bad design, not stupid users, and gave us affordances, signifiers,…
An interactive companion to Mel Robbins's guide to reclaiming your time and energy from other people — built on two words, Let Them, and the far more demanding follow-through, Let Me.
This is an edited anthology, not a monograph: eighteen contributors, framed by editors Charu Arya and Nabanita Deka (with a Foreword by Delhi University's Raj Kumar), read a wide field of…
This edited handbook maps India's welfare architecture programme by programme, from its constitutional moorings in the Directive Principles of State Policy (DPSP), through the rights-based…
Over the last decade India's election campaigns have been transformed by pollsters, 'big data' analysts, spin doctors, PR experts, social media volunteers and a wholly new industry of…
Banerjee argues that Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) is a deeply gendered project organized around 'armed masculinity' — the idea that a nation proves itself through martial strength,…
Neha Dixit spent nearly nine years and some 900 interviews reconstructing the life of one woman she calls Syeda X: a Banarasi weaver's wife who fled communal riots to Delhi in 1995 and,…
Odisha's Land Rights to Slum Dwellers Act (2017) and the JAGA Mission were hailed as a pioneering model: instead of demolishing slums, the state would grant in-situ land titles to residents…
Ashraf reads the events at Bhima Koregaon as "in its essence, a clash between two worldviews over the principles of organising society" — the Brahminical order that justifies caste…
Kaiser argues that anti-Muslim violence in India has undergone a qualitative shift since the BJP came to national power in 2014.
Truschke narrates nearly 5,000 years of life on the Indian subcontinent (largely today's Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, with Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Nepal and others appearing) as a…
On 20 April 2022, nine JCB bulldozers demolished roughly fifty Muslim-owned shops and homes in Block C of Jahangirpuri, Delhi, days after communal violence sparked by an armed Hindu…
Baral argues that British colonialism in Northeast India was not a monolithic story of conquest but a 'dynamic process' that collided with the region's dense geography, oral cultures, and…
Sabastian's central provocation is in her title. She does not argue that India merely 'imported' Italian Fascism or German Nazism, nor that Hindutva must be measured against a European…
Kapila reads India's most famous political actors — Tilak, Gandhi, Savarkar, Ambedkar, Iqbal, the Ghadar insurgents and Patel — not as strategists or partisans but as original political…
Malik rejects the familiar story of a monolithic "Islam in India" that arrives by fire and sword, enjoys a golden age, and then declines into fanaticism.
At Firoz Shah Kotla, a ruined fourteenth-century Tughlaq palace in the heart of Delhi, thousands of people — Hindu and Muslim, and disproportionately women and the poor — gather each…
Gaya's central claim is that the strident, Islamophobic nationalism now inescapable in Indian public life is neither new nor accidental.
Sathyamala argues that the popular image of India as a vegetarian nation is a myth manufactured largely under colonial rule and sustained by an upper-caste minority.
Faisal Devji reads Pakistan not as the homeland of an ethnic or territorial nation but as a state founded on an abstract political idea.
This is not a single-argument monograph but a Springer reference work: over two hundred short scholarly entries, contributed by international scholars and coordinated largely at CHRIST…
In the late 1990s a militant Dalit movement in Tamil Nadu, the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal (Liberation Panthers), abandoned its boycott of elections and reinvented itself as a political party,…
Meera Nanda argues that two movements that appear to be political opposites in India — the postmodernist, ecofeminist, postcolonial 'new social movements' on the left, and the Hindu…
This edited collection maps what the editors call the 'entanglements between digital technologies, nationalism, neoliberalism and sexual subjectivities in India'.
Alinsky wrote 'Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals' (1971) as the mirror image of Machiavelli's The Prince: 'The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on…
This is an academic intellectual history, not a polemic and not an endorsement. Vinayak Chaturvedi — a professional historian who happens to have been named 'Vinayak' after Savarkar by one…
This is a journal article (Contemporary South Asia, 2026), not a book — an ethnographic study built on fieldwork with the Munda and Oraon Scheduled-Tribe communities of Kakdwip in the…
Indian public life takes it for granted that the subcontinent possesses distinctive indigenous traditions of 'tolerance' that must ground any workable secularism.
Chatterji rejects the standard story in which the partitions of 1947 and 1971 sent India, Pakistan and Bangladesh 'flying off to distant corners of the universe'.
This edited volume asks a deceptively simple question: after nearly eight decades of Independence, how far have the lives of Indian women actually improved, and how much of the visible…
A comprehensive guide covering cash transfers, public works, food subsidies, targeting methodologies, and the political economy of social protection across the developing world.
The Nobel-winning case for fighting poverty one rigorously-tested intervention at a time — nutrition, health, education, microfinance and savings, read through RCTs and the behavioural lives of the poor.
The Nobel-winning theory of why prosperity and poverty are made by institutions — inclusive versus extractive — and how critical junctures, creative destruction and elite incentives decide a nation's path.
Sen's reframing of development as the expansion of human freedoms — the capability approach, the five instrumental freedoms, famines and democracy, and women's agency at the heart of change.
Piketty's landmark study of wealth and inequality: r > g, the capital/income ratio, the U-shaped history of concentration, patrimonial capitalism, and the case for a progressive tax on capital.
The definitive history of independent India — Partition, the integration of the princely states, the Nehru era, linguistic states, the Emergency and 1991 reforms — and why the world's largest democracy held together.
The definitive textbook covering economic development theory — inequality, poverty traps, credit markets, land reform, migration, and trade — with rigorous models and South Asian case studies.
28 chapters by specialist contributors covering the founders of modern economics from Aristotle and Ibn Khaldun through Smith, Ricardo, Marx, and Keynes. Backhaus’s editor-premise, via Pareto: economic theories, applied as policy, become the social facts they describe.
Deb’s eco-socialist critique of the doctrine of development. Dismantles eight neo-classical myths, introduces “developmentality” as the epistemic apparatus that renders alternatives invisible, and grounds strong sustainability in empirical evidence from his Basudha farm in West Bengal.
A practical guide to design thinking as a creative problem-solving methodology — covering empathy, iteration, interdisciplinary collaboration, and applications from healthcare to civic engagement.
The classic introductory econometrics textbook — regression analysis, hypothesis testing, multicollinearity, heteroscedasticity, autocorrelation, and simultaneous equations with real-world examples.
A hands-on approach to econometrics through real-world examples — covering linear regression, panel data, logit/probit models, time series, and more with practical applications.
A practical guide to effective data communication — decluttering visuals, choosing the right chart, using preattentive attributes, and crafting narratives that drive action.
Data, charts, and maps for communication — covering truthfulness in visualisation, statistical reasoning, and how to create graphics that inform rather than mislead.
The seminal work on statistical graphics — data-ink ratio, chartjunk, sparklines, and principles for displaying data with clarity, precision, and efficiency.
Stripping the dread from data — an entertaining guide to probability, regression, central limit theorem, and how statistics can illuminate or deceive.
How bad statistics are created, spread, and used to mislead — a guide to becoming a critical consumer of numbers in media, policy, and everyday life.
How to inspire the world with data — the history of data visualization, storytelling principles, and how to create graphics that people actually trust and remember.
How climate science is communicated to policymakers and the public — visual strategies, uncertainty framing, and effective data presentation for climate action.
The foundational theory behind modern data visualisation — algebraic framework for constructing statistical graphics, from data transformations to aesthetic mappings and geometric objects.
A primer on systems thinking — feedback loops, stocks and flows, leverage points, and how to understand complex systems from ecosystems to economies.
Tiny changes, remarkable results — the four laws of behaviour change, habit stacking, identity-based habits, and practical strategies for building good habits and breaking bad ones.
Rules for focused success in a distracted world — why deep work matters, how to cultivate it, and strategies to produce at an elite level in the knowledge economy.
21 great ways to stop procrastinating and get more done in less time — prioritisation techniques, time management, and the discipline of tackling your hardest task first.
Escape the 9-5, live anywhere, and join the new rich — automation, outsourcing, lifestyle design, and the DEAL framework for redefining work and productivity.
Master hard skills, outsmart the competition, and accelerate your career — nine principles for aggressive, self-directed learning projects.
The power of passion and perseverance — why talent alone isn't enough, how grit predicts success, and practical strategies for cultivating resilience and long-term determination.
Follow them and people will follow you — the foundational laws of leadership from influence and navigation to sacrifice and legacy, with real-world examples.
Be a kick-ass boss without losing your humanity — caring personally while challenging directly, giving and receiving feedback, and building a culture of open communication.
The official guide to public speaking from the TED curator — finding your throughline, storytelling, explanation, persuasion, and the art of presenting ideas worth spreading.
Violate them at your own risk — the timeless laws of marketing from leadership and category to perception, focus, and the law of resources.
The six universal principles of persuasion — reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity — and how they shape decisions in policy, marketing, and everyday life.
A revolutionary way to influence and persuade — the art of capturing attention, priming audiences, and setting the stage before delivering your message.
The surprising truth about moving others — why everyone is in sales now, the new ABCs (attunement, buoyancy, clarity), and how to pitch, improvise, and serve.
Understanding and rebuilding social ecosystems damaged by the opioid crisis — policy frameworks, community interventions, and evidence-based recovery approaches.
A template for how large debt cycles work, built from 48 historical cases. Covers deflationary and inflationary spirals, beautiful deleveraging, and central bank policy levers across crises.
20 chapters on narrative approaches to climate action — entertainment-education, fiction, music, visual arts, journalism, food systems, and digital media for closing the knowing-acting gap.
How digital technologies — IoT, blockchain, AI — can accelerate the transition to a circular economy. Covers EU policy frameworks, barriers, and an Indian circular economy landscape analysis.
A practical methods note on measuring women and girls’ empowerment — covering WEAI, DHS modules, results frameworks, indicator design, and six common measurement biases with Indian field applications.
A methodological history of field experiments in economics — tracing the lab-extension and programme-evaluation strands, external validity debates, and capability-approach connections.
How public policy theory interacts with practice and teaching — covering the theory-practice gap, evidence-based policymaking, practitioner reflections, and lessons from Australia, New Zealand and India.
A comprehensive introduction to statistics using R — covering research design, descriptive statistics, hypothesis testing, regression, ANOVA, and factor analysis with practical R code examples throughout.
A companion to USAID’s M&E frameworks — covering CLA Toolkit, Evaluation Toolkit, Monitoring Toolkit, MEL Plans, performance and impact evaluation guidance.
A companion to key social norms and social & behavior change resources — covering norm diagnostics, ego-network analysis, programme design for norm shift, and measurement approaches.
A comprehensive open-access volume on health financing — covering UHC frameworks, revenue raising, pooling, purchasing, the WHO cube, and global fund architecture with 19 chapters.
A practical playbook for city-level innovation teams — four phases from setting an ambitious mission (AIM) through prototyping, iterating, and sustaining innovation as business as usual.
A three-textbook companion covering qualitative research methods — epistemology, sampling, interviewing, coding, thematic analysis, and writing up qualitative findings. 21 chapters, open access.
A companion to Sengupta’s article on the value of randomised controlled trials in developing contexts — 7 case studies examining RCT design, ethics, and external validity across the Asia-Pacific.
A multi-source companion covering the research design workflow — literature review, formative research, mixed methods, survey design, and SBCC programme contexts.
A two-book companion on public speaking and presentation skills for researchers — storytelling techniques, slide design, audience engagement, and overcoming stage anxiety.
18 chapters on statistical methods for small samples — Bayesian approaches, multilevel modelling, SEM with limited data, power analysis, and practical solutions for development research with constrained sample sizes.
Two foundational texts on health inequality monitoring and the ethics of public health — WHO's data methodology (25 chapters) paired with Anand, Peter & Sen's philosophical framework (15 chapters). India applications throughout.
19 chapters following Wooldridge's sequence — simple and multiple regression, IV, panel data, time series — fully implemented in Python with NumPy, statsmodels, and linearmodels. India applications included.
16 chapters on 5 core mnemonic techniques — SEE principle, car method, body method, peg system, and journey method — with cognitive-science underpinnings and India-specific applications (Vedic recitation, exam preparation).
Core concepts in health economic evaluation — cost-effectiveness analysis, cost-utility, QALY/DALY methodology, discounting, sensitivity analysis, and decision modelling for health-technology assessment.
Gandhi's 1909 dialogue arguing that true swaraj is self-rule and self-mastery, not merely swapping British rulers for Indian ones — with his critique of modern civilisation, machinery, railways, doctors and lawyers, and the case for passive resistance.
How an elite, upper-caste party wins poor and lower-caste votes by outsourcing recruitment to the Sangh's nonstate service organisations — recruitment versus mobilisation, and the conditions under which service converts to votes.
An anthology of radical alternatives for India across ecological, political, economic and socio-cultural spheres — eco-swaraj, radical democracy, degrowth, localisation and the solidarity economy.
Ambedkar's undelivered 1936 address on caste as graded inequality — the case for inter-caste marriage, the critique of the shastras and chaturvarnya, and his reply to Gandhi.
Laclau's theory of populism: how heterogeneous demands form chains of equivalence around empty signifiers to construct 'the people' — hegemony, affect, and the logic of political identity.
How mobile phones distribute content, data and money across India — the 'unlimited' promises of Digital India colliding with the structural limits of caste, gender, class, infrastructure and regulation.
Orwell's dystopia of total surveillance, Newspeak, doublethink and the mutable past — read for what it teaches about propaganda, information control and authoritarian governance.
Lived-experience research on India's catastrophic 2021 COVID second wave — informal workers, a surge in domestic violence, the middle class, and the struggle to access hospitals, medicines and vaccines.
Hilal Ahmed on Muslims in New India — 'substantive Muslimness' versus the homogenising discourse of Muslimness, Hindutva constitutionalism, the charitable state, and a restrained hope.
Kochhar uses astronomy, geography and philology to relocate Rigvedic geography toward Afghanistan (Sarasvati = Helmand) — a careful, contested contribution to the Aryan-origins debate.
A step-by-step SBC guide to qualitative formative research — framing the problem, choosing methods, sampling, fieldwork, and turning findings into programme design.
A rigorous nine-step primer for building and validating measurement scales in health, social and behavioural research — item generation, factor analysis, reliability and validity.
A pluralist toolbox of causal-inference methods for policy research — experiments, quasi-experiments, QCA, process tracing and more, with their assumptions and limits.
How access to microdata is transforming policy design — counterfactual impact evaluation methods (DiD, RDD, IV, PSM), administrative data, and safe data access.
A practical guide to research integrity and ethics — misconduct, authorship, peer review, collaboration and handling allegations, built on ICMJE, DORA and COPE standards.
Evidence-based policy briefs on research quality, evaluation, peer review, metrics reform (DORA/CoARA), funding concentration and the open-access paradox.
A practitioner guide to social-impact measurement for non-profits — outputs versus outcomes, purposeful metrics, Goodhart's Law, agile learning loops and the IMPACT framework.
Moving public-service design from expert-driven to user-driven — a seven-step co-design framework tested across six real service projects.
A human-centred design toolkit for digital-health deployments — five guiding questions, six behavioural principles, and a worked immunization-tracking case study.
The step-by-step handbook for designing, running and analysing experience-sampling / EMA studies — sampling schemes, item design, compliance and multilevel analysis.
A full course in qualitative data analysis with NVivo — from project setup and coding to queries, visualisation and writing up.
WHO's guide to monitoring health inequalities — the equity-monitoring cycle, disaggregated data, summary measures, PROGRESS-Plus, and reporting for action.
A data-literacy lab on reading and interrogating charts — chart types, common distortions, and how to question the numbers behind a visualisation.
An NCTQ audit of whether teacher training teaches the six evidence-based instructional strategies — spaced practice, retrieval, interleaving, dual coding, concrete examples and probing questions.
A primer on spatial econometrics with R, Stata and Python — spatial weights, Moran's I, and spatial lag, error and Durbin models with their interpretation.
OpenStax's open introductory statistics course — descriptive statistics, probability, distributions, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing and regression.
An open one-semester introductory statistics textbook — descriptive statistics, probability, sampling distributions, estimation, hypothesis testing and regression.
A code-first guide to NumPy for data work — arrays, dtypes, axis-aware aggregation, boolean masking, broadcasting and the view-versus-copy trap.
Bill Lubanovic's hands-on introduction to Python 3 — data types, control flow, functions, modules, files and data-wrangling for analysis.
The engineering of production ML systems — data pipelines, training, deployment, MLOps, efficiency, and trustworthy, responsible AI.
The classic O'Reilly recipe collection for Python — practical solutions for strings, data structures, files, databases and algorithms (Python 2 era).
Jaffrelot & Ahmed on how Indian Muslims saw themselves and voted in the 2024 election, grounded in CSDS-Lokniti survey data.
Hilal Ahmed on the identity, method and politics of studying Muslims in Hindutva-era India, written amid the anti-CAA protests.
Appadurai's classic on food as a semiotic and political medium in Hindu South Asia — caste, hierarchy, the household and the marriage feast.
A historical anatomy of rightist violence in the West — its emergence, 'high' and 'low' routes, and legacy. A comparative lens (Western-focused), not a South Asia study.
Talal Asad's critical reading of W.C. Smith's The Meaning and End of Religion — anti-essentialism, reification, faith, practice and the secular.
Asad's genealogy of 'ritual' — how the concept shifted from disciplined practice to symbolic representation, and what anthropology inherited.
Sudipta Kaviraj on why Indian Marxism 'mistranslated' Western radical theory — misreading caste as class, and the Communist-versus-reform divide.
Dhar, Jain & Jayachandran on how gender attitudes pass from parents to adolescents in Haryana — and what shifts them.
A meta-analysis of 93 RCTs across 45 countries on how social safety nets — cash, assets, public works, care — affect women's economic achievements and agency.
Hilal Ahmed on how postcolonial India invented, institutionalised and contested the constitutional category of the 'minority'.
A feminist reassessment of unconditional cash transfers for women, grounded in fieldwork on Tamil Nadu's Kalaignar Mahalir Urimai Thogai scheme.
An umbrella review ranking which policies most reduce health inequity — the Health Equity Pyramid, 'agentic demand', and intervention-generated inequality.
An applied, spreadsheet-based first course in statistics for practitioners — descriptive statistics, sampling, distributions, inference and hypothesis testing without heavy maths.
Rohini Hensman's short 2021 essay on why the unwaged domestic labour of working-class households produces labour-power — capitalism's crucial commodity — and what the Wages for Housework demand gets right and wrong in the Indian context.
NCERT's teacher performance-indicator framework (PINDICS/TSAR) — performance standards, four-point rubrics, evidence sources and the self-assessment-to-CPD workflow for school M&E.
Gandhi's autobiography — the making of satyagraha through personal experiments in truth, diet, celibacy and self-rule, from Porbandar and London to South Africa and Champaran.
Louis Fischer's classic biography of Gandhi — the South African crucible, satyagraha, Champaran, Non-Cooperation and the Great Trial, told as narrative history.
The largest study to date of DNS-based web censorship in India — 294 million domains tested across six ISPs, 43,083 blocked domains confirmed, and what it means for internet freedom, press access and circumvention.
A plain-language explainer of how vision / image AI models actually work — patches, embeddings, CLIP, diffusion and multimodal LLMs — with every concept translated into social-sector use cases and risks.
An opposition-party counter-report (Congress/INC research wing) arguing India's headline GDP masks a K-shaped economy — rising inequality, weak job creation and welfare in retreat. A partisan primary source; read alongside official data.
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Reading Companions are interactive, chapter-by-chapter reading guides for essential development texts. They are not summaries — they are designed for practitioners who want to understand, question, and apply the ideas, not just skim them.
All Reading Companions are part of ImpactMojo's free Specials collection, alongside games, labs, and interactive tools.
