Fundamentals

What India does not measure,
and what that costs

India runs some of the largest household surveys in the world. This page is about the other side of them. Eight things the country does not count, counts far below what independent estimates find, or counted once and has not counted since.

Each gap opens the evidence that it exists, what follows from it, and the closest substitute anyone has.

For what India does measure, and measures well, see The Data Room — twelve interactive explorers built on the official surveys. This page is its opposite number.

How to read it

Three ways a population goes missing

Not every gap is the same kind of gap, and the remedy differs. One needs a question added to an instrument. One needs the instrument believed. One needs the survey run again.

Never askedNo national instrument collects it. There is nothing to correct, only something to add.

Counted, badlyAn official figure exists and sits far below what independent estimates find.

FrozenIt was counted once. The number still circulates and the year keeps receding.

Why this page exists

Building the Wheel of Power meant sourcing 113 statistics, and the same holes kept appearing. Some axes had rich data and some had none, and the pattern of which was which was not random.

An absence is harder to cite than a presence, so the rule for this page is the same as the rest of the series. Every claim that something is not measured names the instrument checked and the year it was checked.

The map

Eight gaps, and where the empty cells are

The matrix sets what is being measured against how the measurement fails. Tap a tile, or use the list under it. Every gap has its own shareable link.

All eight, as a list

Sources

Where this comes from

This one is ours

Unlike the rest of the series there is no outside author to credit. The framing is ImpactMojo’s, which also means it carries no external authority: treat it as an argument, and check the sources.

ImpactMojo, 2026 · content CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · code MIT

Sources drawn on

Census of India (2011, 1931) · NSS 76th Round (2018) · Time Use Survey (2019) · Medical Certification of Cause of Death, ORGI (2020, 2022) · Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (2022–23) · WHO (2022) · Bihar Caste-based Survey (2023) · Indra Sawhney (1992) · ASCI (2014) · Union of India submission to the Supreme Court (2018).

Read alongside

The Data Room for the twelve official surveys India does run, and Dataverse for the wider catalogue of datasets and tools.