Development, seen clearly — one honest chart at a time.
Our own data-visualization studio — and a gallery of the greats. We build original charts by hand from real, cited evidence on the questions we teach, draw the frameworks behind the numbers, rebuild the timeless classics in code, and point you to the modern masterworks worth studying. The whole craft, in one room.
Each is drawn from scratch in your browser from a named, public dataset. Hover a source line to see exactly where every number came from — because a chart you can't trace is just decoration.
In a single generation, the share of humanity in extreme poverty fell from nearly 4 in 10 to fewer than 1 in 10 — the steepest decline in deprivation in recorded history.
Source: World Bank Poverty & Inequality Platform, via Our World in Data. Poverty line $2.15/day (2017 PPP).
A child born in India today is more than four times as likely to reach their fifth birthday as one born in 1990 — under-five deaths fell from 127 to 30 per 1,000.
Source: UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation / World Bank Open Data (SH.DYN.MORT), 2024.
A Scheduled Tribe household is about three times as likely to be multidimensionally poor as an "Other" household. Nationally, poverty has since fallen — from 24.8% to 15.0% by NFHS-5 — but the gap between groups persists.
Source: NITI Aayog National MPI. By social group: NFHS-4 (2015–16). National headcount fell from 24.85% to 14.96% by NFHS-5 (2019–21).
Every dot is a country. Most of humanity emits very little — India sits near the bottom of the pack — while a single Qatari emits over 20× as much CO₂ as the average Indian.
Source: EDGAR (European Commission / JRC) — territorial CO₂ emissions per capita, 2023.
2024 was India's warmest year since 1901, and ten of the fifteen warmest years on record have all arrived since 2010. How large the number looks depends on the baseline you measure from.
Source: India Meteorological Department high-resolution gridded data (1901–2024), via Data for India. The warming band is schematic of the documented trend, not per-year values.
After decades of decline, women's recorded participation in India's workforce has turned sharply upward — though much of the rise is unpaid family and self-employment, not salaried jobs.
Source: Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), MoSPI. Female LFPR, usual status, age 15+.
India has all but closed the gender gap in school — girls' enrolment even tops 100% in primary. But the pipeline leaks at every stage: barely 1 in 4 young women reaches higher education.
Source: UDISE+ 2021–22 (school) and AISHE 2021–22 (higher education). Female gross enrolment ratio (GER) by level.
The same data, two axes. Start a bar chart's axis anywhere but zero and you can manufacture a crisis — or hide one. Every chart here starts at zero, on purpose.
Principle: Tufte's "lie factor". A graphic should not say more, or less, than the data.
Data tells you what. Frameworks tell you why, and so what. Here are five of the mental models we teach, drawn from scratch — the scaffolding every good evaluator carries in their head.
Not all "participation" is equal. Sherry Arnstein's 1969 ladder climbs from token consultation to genuine citizen power — a staple of our governance and MEL teaching.
Every theory of change runs from inputs to impact. The hardest gap to cross — and to prove — is the one between what a programme produces and the change in people's lives.
A reinforcing loop: low income starves savings and investment, which holds down productivity, which holds down income. Breaking any one link is the work of development.
Disadvantage compounds. Gender, caste and class are not separate problems to add up — they intersect, and the overlap is where the deepest exclusion sits.
The events we react to sit above the waterline; the patterns, structures and mental models that produce them sit below. Lasting change works underwater.
These were all made with nothing but a browser and honest data. The same tools are waiting for you — pull a dataset, pick a frame, and tell the truth with it.
Four visualizations that changed how the world sees — each in the public domain, and each rebuilt from scratch in your browser, in code, so you can study the craft up close.
Her polar-area "coxcomb" showed that the great blue wedges — soldiers killed by preventable disease in the Crimean War — dwarfed the red of battle wounds. Area, not radius, carries the count.
Why it matters: the original act of data activism — a chart built to move a government. Sanitation reform followed.
About the original →The width of the band is the size of the army; tan advancing on Moscow, black in retreat, with the freezing temperature traced below. 422,000 marched out. 10,000 came home.
Why it matters: Edward Tufte called it possibly the best statistical graphic ever drawn — six variables on one flat page.
About the original →Each mark is a cholera death. Plotted on a street map of Soho, they swarm around a single water pump — the evidence that cholera travelled through water, not "bad air".
Why it matters: the founding map of modern epidemiology. A picture located a cause and saved a neighbourhood.
About the original →For the 1900 Paris Exposition, Du Bois hand-drew dozens of radical, modernist charts of Black American life. This spiral — rising property values against the odds — is rebuilt in his palette.
Why it matters: data visualization as a fight for dignity, decades ahead of its design time. The template for every justice dashboard since.
See the originals (Library of Congress) →Living, breathing visualizations on the themes we teach. We can't reprint them here — so each card sends you to the original, where it belongs. Filter by the question it asks.
We hold ourselves to the standard we teach: a visualization is only as trustworthy as its source. Here is exactly where each chart's data comes from. Check our work.
Begun in the spirit of VizChitra, India's data-visualization community — but made entirely our own.
