Between 4 and 7 October we added twenty foundational courses, a Code Studio for hands-on data work, thirteen reading companions, four Field Radio videos and a new Dataverse entry. Across the site, courses and resources now follow the latest data and law, from NFHS-6 to the DPDP Act’s commencement dates. This post lists all of it, with links.
Twenty new 101 courses
The foundational library went from 59 to 79 decks, each a native hundred-slide course written for practitioners in South Asia. They fill the gaps people asked about most: Research Methods, Quantitative Methods, Causal Inference, Programme Design, Participatory Methods, Gender & Development, Caste Studies, Human Rights, Child Rights, Governance & Accountability, Public Policy, Aid & Philanthropy, Inclusive Education, Education Policy, Foundational Literacy & Numeracy, Mental Health, Nutrition, Social Determinants of Health, Media & Communications and Digital Rights & AI.
Each was checked against the statutes, judgments, survey reports and papers it cites before it went live. Education Policy and Inclusive Education now record the Supreme Court's TET directions and the questions the Court has left open, with the dates of its orders. Nutrition and Education Policy carry the latest national figures: NFHS-6 for nutrition, and for NIPUN Bharat, the Ministry of Education's replies in Parliament since December 2025, which put the literacy and numeracy target at the end of Grade 2 where the 2021 mission document said Grade 3. Eighteen older decks now link to the new courses they recommend. The whole platform now holds 100 courses: 21 flagship and 79 foundational, all listed on the 101 index and in the catalogue.
Code Studio
Code Studio is a new home for hands-on data work, with fourteen courses. R, Python, SQL, the tidyverse and pandas run in your browser through WebR, Pyodide and SQLite, so there is nothing to install. Shiny apps open in Posit's Shinylive editor. Guided courses cover Stata, SPSS, jamovi and JASP, OpenRefine, Open Data Editor, QGIS, KoboToolbox and ODK, spreadsheets for M&E, and Git with Quarto. Every runnable cell was run in a browser before it was published, and the guided courses show the commands without inventing output for software we cannot run on the page. R & Python for Development moved here from the 101 series, and its old address still works.
Thirteen new reading companions
The reading companion library now holds 184. The new ones were built from the full texts. Quotations were transcribed from the PDF and checked against it, page ranges come from the book, and any outside fact was checked against a primary source or left out:
- Provincializing Europe (Dipesh Chakrabarty) and Knowledge/Nation, edited by Baidik Bhattacharya and Prathama Banerjee, on how India's humanities and social sciences grew inside the nation.
- Black Skin, White Masks (Frantz Fanon) and Unsettling the Coloniality of Being (Sylvia Wynter).
- Politics of Piety (Saba Mahmood) and Modernity, Religion-Making, and the Postsecular (Arvind-Pal Mandair and Markus Dressler). Both sit alongside the existing Asad and Geertz companions.
- Two methods books: The Emergence of Critical Realist Grounded Theory, and a rebuilt companion to Causality in Policy Studies.
- Two new working papers. The City Through Her Eyes is the NBER survey of 4,137 women in Delhi and Bengaluru on harassment in public spaces. Cash Transfers and the Indian Household is a framework for evaluating India's unconditional transfers.
- Three reports: NITI Aayog's Ease of Doing Research & Development in India, the National Network of Sex Workers' Towards Ethical Journalism, and Anthropic's Detecting and Countering Misuse of AI.
- The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Suicide, written to WHO's guidance for reporting on suicide, with India's Tele-MANAS helpline (14416) at the top.
Where a book gets a fact wrong, its companion says so in the section where the error occurs. Fanon credits the 1848 abolition decree to the Third Republic, though it was the Second. Wynter dates the Valladolid debate to 1556, though it took place in 1550 and 1551. Knowledge/Nation puts the Babri Masjid demolition in 1989, three years early. NITI Aayog's report gives two different figures for the same spending comparison.
Field Radio and the Dataverse
Field Radio has four new short videos from Vandana, bringing the station to 23 clips. They are Why causal inference, on why an improvement is not the same as an impact; the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index as a model of rigorous measurement; feminist evaluation and whose knowledge counts; and community score cards as an MEL practice. Each has a full transcript, so you can read it as well as listen.
The Dataverse gained the Global Macro Database: 46 macroeconomic variables for 239 countries, from 1086 to 2025, harmonised from 167 sources (Müller, Xu, Lehbib and Chen, NBER Working Paper 33714). It is free for academic, teaching and non-profit use, and the entry says commercial use needs written permission.
Current with the latest data and law
Courses, handouts, practice packs, deep dives and the law pages now reflect where things stand in October 2026:
- NFHS-6 (2023-24) is the latest round wherever its fact sheet reports a figure: child stunting at 29.3%, wasting at 19.0% and institutional births at 90.6%. NFHS-5 (2019-21) is named where it is still the source, as for anaemia and breakdowns by caste and wealth.
- The DPDP Act comes into force in stages. The Data Protection Board began work on 13 November 2025, and the duties of data fiduciaries apply from 13 May 2027. Every page that explains the Act gives these dates.
- MGNREGA was repealed from 1 July 2026, and pages point to its successor, the Viksit Bharat G RAM G Act 2025.
- The four Labour Codes have been in force since 21 November 2025, in place of 29 central labour laws.
- The Development Law Docket gives the current status of each of its 109 judgments, including later rulings that modified or overruled them.
Teaching cases in the handouts and practice packs use fictional organisations and say so, and their figures are marked as illustrative, so a worked example never puts invented results in a real organisation’s name.
For members and teams
The paid plan is now called Membership everywhere, and Pro Studio is the set of 13 research tools, most of them free to use. The Advisory Board now runs on your own API key from Groq, Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic or DeepSeek, so anyone can try it. Team accounts can assign learning paths, import members from a CSV and request branded certificates or GST invoices from the dashboard.
If there is a course, a book or a dataset you would like to see here next, write to us.