Data for India: Analyzing Trends and Patterns Through Statistics

I really enjoyed this episode on The Seen and The Unseen podcast by Amit Varma with Rukmini S, where they discuss data journalism, the process of cleaning and telling stories rooted in data, founding and managing the fantastic web portal Data for India and some counter-intutive trends in India like the rise of custom tailoring.

Data for India does the hard work for us - collating data for national reliable sources, building it in interactive charts and tables and analysing these for us. I wish I had access to this as an Economics student at Xavier's ~15 years ago, struggling to get hold of clean data for my assignments (or general curiosity)!

Here's some interesting stories from Data for India, which we all should know.

1. India's 140 Million Graduates, Still Largely Out of the Workforce or Unemployed

India's share of adult population i.e. demographic dividend is higher than most countries in the world. Yet, fewer than 15% of Indians above the age of 25 have completed a graduate degree!

Even amongst these, a third of the graduates, largely women, are out of the workforce. So, while we can celebrate milestones and achievements of women at work in India, we've really got miles to go before we sleep. Reasons for women, as expected is largely due to home care activities. But even amongst those looking for a job, ~9% unemployment for both men and women signals a large gap in quality employment opportunities. And with AI, we can only predict an even higher unemployment rate for white collar jobs, especially in the short term. What do graduates in India do? Two-thirds of graduate workers work in the services sector. Education, trade, computer programming, public administration and financial services are the top employing industries for graduates in services.

Source: What do India's graduates do? by Abhishek Waghmare, Data For India (November 2025): https://www.dataforindia.com/graduate-employment/

2. Women Working in India But in the Home, Mainly Childcare

India's most recent labour statistics show that while eight in ten men are in the labour force, only four in ten women are, lower than most comparable countries like Vietnam, China or Bangladesh. Women who are not in the labour force are still working, but in a way that is different from how work is understood in economics. This unpaid care and domestic work is mostly performed by women, classified mainly as childcare or personal commitments at home. Additionally, about one in three working women are work in a household enterprise but do not get paid for their work.

Source: Women and work in India by Abhishek Waghmare, Data For India (March 2024): https://www.dataforindia.com/women-and-work/

Interesting, you can look at the top occupations for urban men, urban women, rural men and rural women to see the stark differences:

1. Urban men: Top occupations for urban men are shopkeeping or selling items. Driving vehicles and working at construction sites are common jobs at lower levels of education, while managerial and technology roles like software development are the top occupations as education levels rise among urban men.

2. Urban women: The top occupations for urban women are garment work such as tailoring and that of cleaners and helpers in homes, hotels and offices. And, higher educated urban women are most likely to work as teachers.

3. Rural men: A third of the men are engaged in agriculture followed by construction workers and shopkeepers.

4. Rural women: All of the top five occupations for rural women are related to agriculture, and they cover three quarters of working women. In this way it is different from rural men, where all in addition to agriculture, there's also shopkeeping and construction.

3. Largest Number in the World i.e. 18.5MM Emigrants from India

India has the world's largest emigrant population, with over 18.5 million people of Indian origin (~6% of international migrants) living overseas in 2024. Between 1990 and 2024, the number of Indian emigrants grew ~3x from 6.5 million to 18.5 million. Indians make up greater than a quarter of the population in UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. While immigrants in West Asia are largely men from India, the Western countries like USA and UK have an equal number of Indian origin men and women.

Source: International migration from India by Nileena Suresh, Data For India (February 2025): https://www.dataforindia.com/international-migration/

So what?

While not exhaustive, here are some ways I think platforms such as Data for India are great!

• Establishes authority and analyses as non‑partisan and independent, giving governments, leaders and academics structured options and evidence

• Researchers and journalists can leverage cleaned datasets to influence policy, such as women workforce participation

• Gives confidence and data when framing problem statements for governments, private sector and even

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• educational institutions

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