What changed, and when

Updates

A plain-language record of what changed on this site and when. Data on this site is revised as official releases land, and corrections are made in public. This page exists to make both visible. Each entry corresponds to a published version of the site. The full technical detail, including internal refactors not worth listing here, is in the repository's CHANGELOG.

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2026-10-12 · v2.56.0

Link previews and sharing

Each page now shows its own title, summary and chart when shared, and every page has a share row.

Added: Every page has its own link-preview card, drawn from the page's own title, summary and first chart in the site's split design, so a link shared on WhatsApp, X or LinkedIn shows what the page says. The cards are rebuilt by tools/build_og.py and CI fails when one is out of date.
Added: Every page has a share row: WhatsApp with the title, summary and link already written, X, LinkedIn, email, and a copy-link button where the browser allows it. The links load nothing from those services until a reader taps one.
Added: Structured data for search engines: each topic page under /explore/ is described as a dataset (licence, coverage, the series it measures and the CSV and JSON downloads), and the working paper as a scholarly article.
Removed: The old social card (og-preview.png), which showed the earlier design and figures since corrected.

2026-10-12 · v2.55.0

Forecast arithmetic and the site's own projections

What the published forecasts do to the comparison, and back-tested projections for series nobody else forecasts.

Added: The forecasts page now shows what each published GDP forecast for 2026-27 does to the NDA-period average. With any of them the average stays below the UPA decade's 6.82%; matching it would need 14.3% growth in 2026-27.
Added: The site's own projections, to 2026, for three series no institution forecasts: the top 1% and bottom 50% income shares and formal-job coverage. Three simple models are scored by a rolling-origin back-test, the winner is used, and each projection carries an 80% interval built from its past errors. They are drawn as hollow markers with a shaded interval and never enter an average. The site does not forecast GDP or inflation itself.

2026-10-12 · v2.54.1

The fieldwork accounts are back

The people behind the data, restored on their own page.

Added: The four accounts from the old dashboard are back, on a page of their own: three from the author's fieldwork interviews, with the quotations as recorded, and one from the public record. Each sits beside the charts of the series it relates to. The account of the withheld consumption survey now dates MoSPI's decision correctly (15 November 2019).
Fixed: The writing check now reads every /explore/ page and the primer, forecasts and fieldwork sources.

2026-10-10 · v2.54.0

The data pages, rebuilt and rechecked

Every page was fact-checked against its sources, the dashboard was rebuilt as generated pages in the site's design, and the scenario trajectory gave way to published forecasts.

Changed: The data pages are rebuilt in the site's design. The 16-tab dashboard is replaced by one page per topic (growth and prices, work, income shares, democracy, official statistics, the Union and the states), a sortable states table, a two-series comparison, a primer and a sources page, all generated from data.json. Old dashboard links forward to the page that now holds the material.
Changed: The 2030 trajectory scenarios are replaced by a page of published forecasts for 2026-27 and 2027-28 from the RBI, the World Bank, the OECD, the ADB and the IMF, each quoted from the publication. The site makes no forecast of its own.
Changed: Every analysis page now carries charts of its own series and links to the topic page behind it. Analyses whose titles had changed get new addresses that match them; the old addresses forward.
Changed: The site has a logo and a favicon: the page split drawn as a mark.
Removed: The dashboard's three worker stories, which quoted named people with no interview record, and two methodology charts drawn from figures the indices do not compute.
Fixed: GDP growth for 2023-24, 2024-25 and 2025-26 is 7.2, 7.1 and 7.7%, as MoSPI's releases of 27 February and 5 June 2026 give them. The site had 7.3, 7.2 and 7.8, the values MoSPI's data API returns. The NDA-period average is 6.20% (7.29% without 2020-21).
Fixed: CPI inflation for 2025 is 2.4%, the change in the annual average index, the convention used for every other year. The NDA-period average is 4.82%.
Fixed: The 2026-27 fiscal deficit (4.3%) and NITI's 2020-21 gig-worker figure (7.7 million) are a Budget Estimate and a projection. They are now drawn as hollow markers beside the observed series and left out of every average.
Fixed: The paper: the 2026-27 deficit is below the earlier era's average; the current-account deficit was 0.6% of GDP in 2025-26; the services surplus about $217 billion; the CPI weights are MoSPI's (housing and utilities 17.67%, transport 8.80%, health 6.10%); the recruitment figures cover central government, 2014-15 to 2021-22; the April 2026 delimitation amendment that failed is recorded; the 2013-14 growth figure was later revised to 6.4%; and a robustness check on the RSF country count is added.
Fixed: Sector shares use the 2022-23 national accounts base and PLFS 2025; the goods deficit and FPI outflow use the RBI balance of payments; states are grouped by zonal council.
Fixed: The front page: the growth series joins two national-accounts bases (it had said three); RSF ranked 167 to 179 countries in the UPA years; the fiscal index is higher after 2014 because of GST and the 2020 borrowing conditions, while the measured ratios were slightly more centralised before.
Fixed: The downloads: the share of workers in regular jobs with social security (10.1%) replaces a residual presented as a count of workers without cover; worked examples are labelled as made up; the policy brief no longer sets deadlines it did not model; the licence notice states that CC BY allows commercial use; the research package lists what its files contain and now includes the index code and the master dataset.
Fixed: The care valuations name their sources, and the EPW range, which could not be traced to the article, is labelled as reported.

2026-10-10 · v2.53.2

One rounding error and one old title

A check of every index average quoted across the site found one figure rounded the wrong way, and three pages still used an earlier title for the paper.

Fixed: The Statistical Suppression Index averages 4.78 over the NDA period (4.7846), not 4.79 as the paper and the technical appendix said. Every other index average was recomputed and is unchanged.
Fixed: The paper has one title, Growth Without Accountability: Measuring India's Institutional and Distributional Transformation, 2004-2026. The executive summary and the research package now use it.

2026-10-10 · v2.53.1

The new design, fixed for phones

On a phone the new design put every block of text in a bordered panel the width of the screen, which left two thin strips of colour at the edges and nothing else of the split. Text now runs on a plain page, and the two colours appear only where they mark the two periods: the opening years, the scorecard and the charts.

Fixed: Phone layout on every page: text runs edge to edge on plain paper, the split stays in the era header, the scorecard rows and the charts, and the three indices sit as a number beside its description.

2026-10-10 · v2.53.0

A new design, split where the governments changed

The site has a new design. Every page is divided where the UPA decade ends and the NDA period begins, at the share of the page width that each period holds in years, so a chart's 2013/2014 boundary falls on the dividing line. The front page is now a short reading page built from the data, and the interactive dashboard has moved to its own address. No figure changed.

Changed: The front page now opens with the scorecard and six findings, each with its series drawn across the dividing line. The interactive dashboard is at /explore/, and old links to its tabs still work.
Fixed: The declaration of interest said the author is a Manmohan Singh Fellow of the All India Professionals' Congress. The author is a former fellow, and this work began before the fellowship. The paper, the dashboard, the walkthrough, the media kit and the repository now say so, and the front page carries the declaration in its footer.
Changed: A new palette and typeface on every page: teal for the UPA decade, violet for the NDA period, and one sans-serif family in place of the serif. Every text colour clears 4.5:1 in both light and dark mode.
Fixed: An accessibility audit of every dashboard tab found eleven text colours below the contrast threshold and four scrolling blocks a keyboard could not reach. All are fixed.

2026-10-10 · v2.52.0

A full fact check of every page

Nine reviewers checked every factual claim on the site, the paper, the walkthrough, the explainers and the downloads against its source, and about 250 corrections followed. The cross-era comparison still finds the NDA period worse on eight of nine measures, but growth is now closer than the site said: lower overall, and higher than the UPA decade once the pandemic year is left out.

Fixed: GDP growth now uses one year convention (2014 = 2014-15) and MoSPI's latest estimates, with the new 2022-23 base from 2023-24. 2020-21 is -5.8% (was -7.3%) and 2021-22 is 9.7% (was 8.7%). The NDA period averages 6.2% against 6.8% for the UPA decade; leaving out 2020-21 it averages 7.3%, above the UPA decade's 6.8% (7.2% without 2008-09). The site had said the later period stayed behind even without the pandemic year.
Fixed: CPI inflation is now on calendar years throughout. 2025 was 2.2%, not 4.0%. Unemployment for 2014 and 2016 is left empty, because the Labour Bureau ran no survey for those years.
Fixed: The Statistical Suppression Index had scored the withheld jobs survey from 2017 and the scrapped consumption survey from 2018, before either happened. They are now dated to December 2018 and November 2019. The NDA average is 4.78.
Fixed: Press-freedom and democracy comparisons: RSF's 2026 ranks for Brazil (52), Turkey (163), Hungary (74) and South Africa (21) and Brazil's 2014 rank (111) corrected; India is not the worst-ranked of its peers, and Brazil improved most. India's democratic decline is the largest in the site's five-country group, not among all major economies, since the United States fell further. V-Dem's electoral-autocracy classification is dated to its March 2021 report.
Fixed: Two charts plotted interpolated or invented values as data. Communal incidents now show only the Home Ministry's published counts for 2004-2017, and rural toilet coverage only published figures. The opposition-incarceration and exam-disruption series had no year-by-year source and are removed; their cards now describe documented events.
Fixed: Time Use Survey figures were given for the wrong age group and mixed two participation measures. They now give ages 6 and above (women 289 minutes, men 88) and 15-59 (women 305) separately, and men's participation in unpaid domestic work as 26.1% to 27.1%.
Fixed: The primer's budget charts now match the Budget 2026-27 rupee charts; the wealth-tax proposal uses the World Inequality Lab's Rs 10 crore threshold; the current account deficit for 2025-26 is 0.6% of GDP; state incomes use one MoSPI vintage; India is the sixth-largest economy (IMF April 2026); crude import dependence is about 88%.
Fixed: The paper, the technical appendix and the downloads were corrected throughout: electoral bonds Rs 16,518 crore, corporate tax 22%, capital-gains rates since July 2024, the Grier and Grier title and robustness claims, the RBI's report on a missed inflation target going to the Central Government, the reference list, and claims with no source removed (among them a wealth Gini of 0.85, '170 million women', '40 million missing jobs').

2026-10-10 · v2.51.0

The three indices and the fiscal and jobs claims checked against their publishers

Every input to the three indices was checked against its publisher. The fiscal index was rebuilt from Finance Commission, Budget and RBI figures and now tells a narrower story: the NDA period still scores as more centralised, but because of GST and the 2020 borrowing conditions, while devolution to states rose after 2015. The NDA period remains worse than the UPA decade on eight of nine comparable measures.

Fixed: The Fiscal Centralisation Index used inputs that matched no published series. Devolution was shown near 35% of gross tax revenue under UPA and falling under NDA. The 16th Finance Commission's figures are 25.8% in 2004-05 and 27.9% in 2013-14, rising to 34.8% in 2015-16 after the 14th Finance Commission and 33.9% in 2024-25. States' own revenue was shown 15 to 20 points too low, and conditional grants were shown rising steadily to 42% of transfers, where the published share moves between 27% and 40%. The index now uses the published figures and leaves empty the years with none. It averages 0.30 under UPA and 0.43 under NDA, peaks at 0.87 in 2020 and is 0.35 in 2026. On the four measured fiscal ratios alone the eras are close (0.49 and 0.45), so the higher NDA score comes from GST and the 2020 borrowing conditions.
Fixed: The cess and surcharge share of gross tax revenue was described as rising from 8% to 29%. The 15th Finance Commission and the Union Receipt Budgets put it at 10.4% in 2011-12, a peak of 24.4% in 2020-21 and 18.0% in 2024-25. The cess chart and its data file now use these figures.
Fixed: Freedom House scores in the Democratic Quality Index were too high for the UPA years (78-79 against published 76-77) and for 2024-2025 (66 against 63 and 62). RSF's 2012 rank was the 2013 rank repeated; RSF's 2011-12 index gives 131. V-Dem's two series match its March 2026 release exactly. The DQI for 2026 is 0.28 and the NDA average 0.37.
Changed: The census is scored as a scheduled delay in 2026 (houselisting from April 2026, enumeration notified for February 2027), so the Statistical Suppression Index for 2026 is 4.65 in place of 6.4.
Fixed: Employment elasticity of 0.01 was attributed to 2014-17 and called the lowest since independence. RBI puts 0.01 at 2004-05 to 2009-10, and ORF puts it at 2011-16 with 1.11 for 2017-23. The technical appendix's elasticity table, whose confidence intervals and R-squared values nothing had computed, is replaced by the published estimates. Two unsourced figures, '80% of new jobs are precarious' and '45% of youth underemployed', are replaced by the ILO and IHD India Employment Report 2024.
Fixed: The methodology document described analyses the project never ran (difference-in-differences, synthetic control, structural-break tests, bootstrap intervals, external-validation correlations) and a replication guide for files that do not exist. It now describes what the project does.
Fixed: The downloadable master dataset was a separate hand-kept copy that disagreed with the site and carried columns with no source. It is now written from the site's data by a script and checked in CI, and the replication scripts in Python and R run against it and reproduce the eight-of-nine comparison.
Fixed: The rupee series was checked against the Federal Reserve's H.10 monthly averages; 2023 is 83 in place of 82.

2026-10-10 · v2.50.0

Formal employment and income shares corrected to the published figures

Two more findings rested on figures that did not match their sources. Formal employment now comes from the Periodic Labour Force Survey, and the top 1% and bottom 50% income shares come from the World Inequality Lab's published table. Both still show the NDA years doing worse than the UPA years, by less than the site said.

Fixed: Formal employment was shown falling from 13.0% in 2014 to 10.9% in 2026, in ten of twelve years. The site now derives it from PLFS: regular wage and salaried workers as a share of all workers, times the share of those employees with any social security. That gives 11.5% in 2017-18, 9.6% in 2022-23 and 10.1% in 2023-24. PLFS begins in 2017-18, so the other years are empty. The share fell before the pandemic and has recovered part of the loss. Among regular employees, the share with no social security rose from 49.6% to 53.4%.
Fixed: The top 1% income share was shown at 23.0% in 2026 and the bottom 50% at 12.9%. The World Inequality Lab's table (Bharti, Chancel, Piketty and Somanchi, 2024) ends at 2022-23, with the top 1% at 22.6%, its highest since 1922, and the bottom 50% at 15.0%. The bottom half's share fell to 13.9% in 2017 and rose to 15.5% in 2020, so the claim that income was redistributed upward for twelve straight years is withdrawn. The years 2023 to 2026 are left empty.
Fixed: The primer said the top 1% share fell from 12% in 1951 to 4.4% in 1981. The table gives 11.5% in 1951 and a low of 6.1% in 1982. The bottom 50% wealth share was shown as 4%; the table gives 6.4% for 2022-23. A robustness row comparing CMIE and WID inequality figures was removed from the technical appendix because no source for it could be found.
Fixed: The 2026 rupee average is now 94 to the dollar (January to September), the 2026 fiscal deficit is the Budget Estimate for 2026-27, 4.3% of GDP, and the rupee's record low is 96.8 (20 May 2026).
Fixed: Tables, the timeline, the era comparison chart, the CSV export, the scatter plot, the projections and the change cards now skip years with no published figure. The scatter plot's correlation had been computed over empty years since the earlier corrections.

2026-10-10 · v2.49.0

Five series corrected to the published figures, and a data story rewritten

Five series did not match the sources they named: graduate and youth unemployment, women's labour force participation, gig workers and rural household income. Each now uses the published figures, and the years with no published figure are left empty. Two findings reverse: women's participation and rural incomes both rose.

Fixed: Graduate unemployment had read 26.5% to 31% for recent years. MoSPI's published rate for graduates aged 15 and over is 13.0% for 2023-24, down from 17.2% in 2017-18. The site now uses MoSPI's series for 2017-18 to 2023-24 and leaves the other years empty, because MoSPI publishes no graduate figure for them. Graduate unemployment is four times the overall rate, not five, and the analysis and the paper now say so.
Fixed: Youth (15-29) unemployment ran 2.5 to 3 points above MoSPI's published rates and put its peak in 2020. MoSPI's series peaks at 17.8% in 2017-18 and falls to 9.9% in 2025. The analysis that said youth unemployment peaked during COVID now says it has fallen since 2017-18 and stays about three times the all-age rate.
Fixed: Women's labour force participation was shown falling from 22.5% to 21.0%, with PLFS named as the source. PLFS publishes 23.3% for 2017-18, rising to 41.7% for 2023-24 and 40.0% for 2025. The analysis, the paper, the care explainer, the walkthrough and the downloads now use the published figures. PLFS counts a woman who helps without pay in a household enterprise as a worker, and the site says so.
Fixed: Gig workers were shown rising from 0.8 million in 2014 to 8.8 million in 2026, citing NITI Aayog. NITI's report estimates 2.5 million in 2011-12, 5.3 million in 2017-18 and 6.8 million in 2019-20, and puts 2020-21 at 7.7 million. The years NITI only projects are left empty. The analysis now says the gig workforce nearly tripled between 2011-12 and 2019-20.
Fixed: Rural household income was shown flat in real terms since 2014, citing NABARD. NABARD's survey has two rounds: Rs 8,059 a month in 2016-17 and Rs 12,698 in 2021-22. After rural inflation (24.2% on MoSPI's CPI-Rural) that is a real rise of about 27%. The share of rural households in debt rose from 47.4% to 52%. The analysis, the farmer story and its chart now say so, and a primer chart that used household income as a stand-in for wages was removed.
Fixed: The data story on statistical suppression put a quotation about consumption data in P.C. Mohanan's mouth. Mohanan resigned on 28 January 2019 over the withheld 2017-18 jobs survey; the consumption survey was withheld in November 2019. It also said the last consumption survey was 2011-12, when HCES 2022-23 was published in February 2024. The story now gives the dates and figures as published, and an unattributed quotation was removed.
Fixed: The international chart was titled 'India shows steepest decline'. Since the V-Dem correction in 2.39.0, India has the largest absolute fall in its peer group (0.228 points) and Turkey the largest proportional one. The title now says largest absolute fall.
Changed: The three worker quotations in the homepage data stories are now attributed to primary research.

2026-10-10 · v2.48.0

New 2026 figures, three changes of measure marked, and the prose rewritten

Unemployment, inflation and GDP growth for 2026 now use MoSPI's releases up to October 2026. All three changed measure or base in 2026, and the site now says so on the chart and in the paper. Every page was also rewritten in plain prose.

Data: Unemployment for 2026 is now 5.2%, the average of the eight PLFS monthly bulletins from January to August 2026. It was the June figure of 5.5%. The monthly bulletins report current weekly status, which runs well above the usual-status rate of the annual reports used for 2014 to 2025. Most of the rise from 3.1% in 2025 is that change of measure, and the source note had wrongly called the 2026 figure usual status. On the same weekly measure MoSPI's calendar-year rate for 2025 was 5.3%, so like for like the 2026 figure is close to level.
Data: Inflation for 2026 is now 3.8%, the average of the January to August 2026 prints on the new 2024=100 base. It was the July print of 4.45%. The NDA-period average moves from 4.98% to 4.93%.
Data: GDP growth for 2026 (2025-26) is now 7.8%, MoSPI's Provisional Estimate on the new 2022-23 base. It was the First Advance Estimate of 7.4% on the old 2011-12 base, which MoSPI has replaced. The 2014-2026 average moves from 6.08% to 6.11% and still rounds to 6.1%.
Fixed: The unemployment series for 2017 to 2020 did not match MoSPI's published rates. The 2017-18 survey was counted twice (6.0% and 6.1%), the 2019-20 rate of 4.8% was missing, and the 7.1% shown for 2020 matched no usual-status figure. Each year from 2017 is now the survey year starting in July of it, so 2017 to 2020 read 6.0%, 5.8%, 4.8% and 4.2%.
Fixed: An analysis said India's unemployment rate was unusually low for its income level and that most middle-income countries record 6-10%. On the ILO's modelled estimates India was at 4.2% in 2025, against 4.5% for lower-middle-income countries and 4.9% for middle-income countries. The analysis now says India is close to its peers.
Added: The indicator explorer circles the 2026 point of each of these three series and says which measure changed.
Fixed: The paper and two analyses said the formal employment share fell in every year since 2014. The dataset shows it rose once, from 11.4% to 11.5% in 2021, and held at 11.2% from 2023 to 2024. They now say it fell in ten of the twelve years, from 13.0% to 10.9%.
Fixed: Several downloads still carried figures corrected in earlier releases. The technical appendix's income-share table used the crossed top 1% series fixed in 2.33.0, and its results table and the methodology used the DQI values before the 2.39.0 correction. The citizen guide, the media kit and the executive summary had the same problems with the top 1% share, GDP growth and the press-freedom rank. The research package said MIT licence where the site is CC BY 4.0. All now match the dataset.
Fixed: The paper pointed to the wrong sections twice, and said a gap of 0.18 'narrows' to 0.19. Both are corrected.
Changed: Every page, the paper, the analyses, the walkthrough and the downloads were rewritten to the site's writing rules: plain full sentences, no em dashes, no slogans, and no 'X, not Y' turns. No figure changed in the rewrite.

2026-08-15 · v2.47.0

The explainers get a front door, and a walkthrough slide

GDP prices the rent on a flat you own and puts nothing against the meal cooked in it. That point now runs through the paper, the methodology, the appendix, the summary, the citizen guide, the policy brief and the analyses. Before this release it sat on one page.

Added: A page at someperspective.info/care on the production boundary: what the national accounts count as production, and what they leave outside. The accounts work out a rent for the flat you own and add it to output. They put nothing against the meal cooked in it. The site had one sentence on unpaid work and nothing behind it.
Data: The National Statistical Office's two Time Use Surveys, from 2019 and 2024, are now in the dataset. Among people aged 15-59 who do it at all, women spent 289 minutes a day on unpaid domestic work in 2024 against 88 minutes for men. For women that comes to about 1,758 hours a year that appear in no employment statistic and no output figure.
Added: Two survey rounds allow the change to be measured, and the result does not point cleanly in either direction. Men's participation nearly doubled, from 26.1% to 45.8%. Minutes fell for both sexes, however, so the gap among participants went from 202 minutes to 201, a change of one minute in five years. Over the same period women's participation in paid employment rose from 21.8% to 25.0%. More women are in paid work, and the unpaid work has not been meaningfully redistributed.
Added: Published Indian valuations of unpaid household work run from 7.5% of GDP to 36%, a factor of nearly five. Almost all of that spread comes from the choice of valuation method, and very little from measurement error. The page publishes the full range with each method named and declines to pick a number. Its claim is narrower. Every one of those estimates is large, and none can be called correct because no statistical agency has been asked to settle the question.
Changed: This bears on a figure used elsewhere on the site. Female labour force participation of about 21% is usually discussed as an absence of work, while the Time Use Survey records 83.9% of women aged 15-59 doing unpaid domestic work on the reference day. Both are true. Together they show the participation figure measures an absence of work inside the boundary. That is now stated where the employment numbers are used.
Note: No figure on this site has been adjusted. Every growth series remains the official one on the official boundary. The claim is that the boundary is a choice, that India already collects the hours needed to value what sits outside it, and that a framework which imputes rent for a dwelling but records zero for the care performed inside it embeds a judgement about whose work counts as production. The research paper carries the same argument as Section 6.11.
Changed: The argument now sits in every document. Methodology gains a section under Limitations. The technical appendix gains A4b, with both Time Use Survey rounds tabulated by sex and the five published valuations listed with their methods. The executive summary states before its findings that the growth figures exclude this work. The citizen guide explains it in plain language. The policy brief asks for the specific thing that would fix it, which is a household production satellite account built on the survey hours India already collects. The media kit carries it as a quotable fact. The paper has it as Section 6.11.
Added: A new standing analysis, 'GDP counts the rent on your flat and nothing for the cooking', with its own permalink. The library is now 37 pieces, and the count on the site is read from the data instead of being typed in, so it no longer goes stale.
Changed: The walkthrough's limits slide now names this too. Every growth figure in the deck sits on the official boundary and none is adjusted.
Fixed: Both long-form explainers were badly buried. The GDP page was reachable from one sentence inside another section and a single footer link, and neither page was in the navigation at all. There is now an Explainers menu in the top navigation and a card near the top of the opening section carrying both. The list is held as data, so the next explainer appears in both places from one line.
Added: The guided walkthrough gains a slide on it, placed straight after the inflation slide so a reader reaches the verdict holding both caveats about what the headline figure does and does not contain. The deck is now eighteen slides. The bullet that had been added to the limits slide is removed, since the point now has a slide of its own.
Fixed: The slide count and the analysis count were typed into the page in several places and had already gone stale twice. Both now come from the data.

2026-08-15 · v2.44.0

Breathing room on phones, and a footer that dates itself

The header was crushing its own subtitle into six lines on a phone, text sat on the very edge of the screen, and three copyright lines disagreed with each other.

Fixed: On a phone the header stayed a horizontal row, so the title and its subtitle were squeezed into about half the screen while the theme controls took the rest. The subtitle wrapped to six lines. The header now stacks below 640 pixels: the title gets the full width and the controls sit on their own row underneath. The subtitle is down to three lines.
Fixed: Text was sitting 16 pixels from the edge of a phone screen, which reads as content jammed against the bezel. The page gutter is now 20 pixels below 640 pixels wide. It costs 8 pixels of line width and buys a visible margin. Tablets are unaffected and keep their wider gutter.
Fixed: Three copyright lines said three different things: 2025-2026 on the main site, 2025 in the executive summary, and 'May 2026' plus a retired project title in the research package. All three now agree. The main site's line also writes its own end year and reads the data vintage from the dataset, so it cannot go stale on the first of January or drift after a data refresh.

2026-08-15 · v2.43.0

A dedicated page on why inflation looks better after 2014

The one measure that improved is now argued out at length, on its own page and in a new section of the paper. Until this release it was handled in a paragraph.

Added: A standalone explainer at someperspective.info/inflation. Consumer price inflation is the single cross-era measure on which India performs better after 2014, at 4.98% against 8.05%. A project that reports eight findings in its own direction and disposes of the ninth in a sentence has not earned the eight. The page sets out six factors in order of how much each explains, then the strongest case that can be made against its own conclusion, then what evidence would change it.
Added: One of those six is new to this project, and it counts against the government. Central excise duty on petrol was ₹9.48 a litre and on diesel ₹3.56 in 2014. Between November 2014 and January 2016 it was raised on nine separate occasions, by ₹11.77 a litre on petrol and ₹13.47 on diesel. The stated purpose was to move the gains from collapsing world oil prices to the exchequer and away from the pump. The disinflation households experienced was therefore the residual after the tax take, and to the extent fiscal policy touched fuel prices in that window it acted to keep them higher than world prices would have delivered.
Added: The research paper gains Section 6.10, which makes the same argument at full length with two sub-sections: the strongest case against the paper's own reading, and what would falsify it. A consistent measure of core inflation excluding food and fuel would settle much of it. This project does not have one going back to 2004, and the paper says so plainly.
Changed: The one-line thesis, which appears in four places on the site and ends 'Inflation is the one exception', now links straight to the explanation.

2026-08-15 · v2.42.0

A state-level view, on 2026 population in place of the 2011 census

The national picture hides most of what matters. There is now a section that answers 'what about my state?' for sixteen states. Representation is measured on the government's own 2026 projection. It had been measured on the 2011 census, which is fifteen years old.

Added: A new 'Your State' section under Data. Choose a state and it reports where that state sits on per-capita income, how many people stand behind each of its Lok Sabha seats, how many rupees come back for every ₹100 of Union tax it pays, and how many seats it is projected to gain or lose if constituencies are ever redrawn. It also gives a sentence you can quote and three charts placing the state against the other fifteen.
Added: People per MP is computed here for the first time, and it is the sharpest number in the section. Because seats were frozen on the 1971 census, representation now varies by a factor of 1.64 across these states: 1.67 million people behind each seat in Kerala against 2.74 million in Rajasthan. A vote is not worth the same everywhere in India, and this says by how much.
Changed: State information was previously scattered across three separate blocks (an income and seats table in one place, tax-return ratios in another, delimitation projections in a third), and none of them could be read together. They are now one table, so a reader can see all four facts about a state at once.
Note: Two limits are stated in the section itself. Every population figure is from the 2011 census, because that is the most recent one India has. Representation is therefore being measured with a fifteen-year-old ruler, which is this project's own argument turning up where it cannot be avoided. The tax-return figures come from an analyst affiliated with the same party body the author holds a fellowship in. The direction is well established and the exact ratios are contestable, and the section says so.
Data: Representation is now computed on projected 2026 population. It had used the 2011 census. The figures come from the National Commission on Population's 'Population Projections for India and States 2011-2036' (Report of the Technical Group, Registrar General of India), Table 21, which gives the projected population of every state as on 1 March 2026. The change matters. On 2011 numbers the gap between the best- and worst-represented state here was 1.64 times, and on 2026 numbers it is 1.85 times, with 1.81 million people behind each seat in Kerala against 3.34 million in Rajasthan. A frozen seat allocation keeps compounding, so using a stale population understated the problem. The 2011 figure is kept alongside each state so the change is visible.
Note: The best population figure available for 2026 is a projection, and it is a projection because the 2021 census was never held. Measuring whether a vote is worth the same across India now depends on an estimate, because there is no recent count. That is this project's central argument turning up in the one place it cannot be argued around.

2026-08-15 · v2.40.0

The walkthrough gets a front door, and readable type on a phone

The guided walkthrough was reachable only from a card in the last section and one footer link. It is now in the navigation and on the landing page. Text on phones was rendering at caption size and now reads normally.

Fixed: Measured on a 390-pixel screen, 94.5% of all visible text on the front page was rendering at 12 or 14 pixels, and only 0.4% at 16. An earlier accessibility pass had raised a 9-pixel floor to 12, which stopped text being unreadable but left the whole page at the size normally used for captions. The scale now moves up a step on phones: body text reads at 16 pixels, paragraphs in the smaller style at 15, and secondary labels at 13.5. Chart labels, table cells and the tab bar are deliberately left where they were, because their size holds the layout together. After the change, 88% of visible text is 15 pixels or larger and no paragraph anywhere renders below 15.
Fixed: On a 320-pixel screen (the narrowest phone still in common use) the header row was 24 pixels wider than the display, which pushes the whole page sideways. It now wraps at that width. Checked at nine screen widths from 320 to 1440 pixels across all fourteen sections, there is no horizontal overflow anywhere.
Fixed: The stylesheet was requested without a version stamp, so a returning visitor could pair newly published markup with a stylesheet up to ten minutes old. It is now stamped with the site version, and a build check fails if the two ever drift apart. The guided walkthrough's data requests are stamped the same way, so the deck cannot draw yesterday's numbers from a cache.
Removed: The shareable PNG of the three indices, added in 2.37.0 for a social-media launch, has been withdrawn along with the post text. The chart itself remains on the site, where it is drawn live from the dataset and can be exported at any time from the Three Indices section.
Added: The guided walkthrough now has a place in the top navigation and a card at the top of the opening section. It is the shortest route through the whole argument. It runs to seventeen slides and about ten minutes, and every figure is drawn live from the dataset. Until now it was reachable only from a tile buried in the last section and a single footer link.
Correction: This page previously said that every entry here maps to a tagged release. The repository has no tags, so that was not true. The sentence now says what is actually the case: each entry corresponds to a published version of the site, with the full technical detail in the repository's changelog.
Changed: The repository's README was three versions and one project title out of date. It now carries the current version, the declaration of interests, links to the walkthrough and paper, and a table of the checks that run on every change.

2026-08-15 · v2.39.0

A declared interest, corrected V-Dem inputs, a loader that recovers, and a sitewide audit

The author's political affiliation is now stated on the site, which had previously denied it. Three errors in this project's own figures are corrected, including a headline growth rate that had been quoted eight ways. A full audit of every page, on desktop and phone, fixed what it found.

Correction: The footer previously said 'No political affiliations.' That was false. The author is a Manmohan Singh Fellow of the All India Professionals' Congress, a department of the Indian National Congress, and this project compares a Congress-led government with its successor. The claim is replaced by a declaration of interests, stated on the site, in the media kit, in the guided walkthrough and in the paper's Declarations. The research remains unfunded and no party body commissioned, reviewed or approved it. That is a separate fact from neutrality, and the site no longer conflates the two.
Correction: Two of the Democratic Quality Index's four components are V-Dem series. The table computing the index held approximations in place of the published values for both, and the approximations were too high in the UPA decade. It used a Liberal Democracy value of 0.555 for 2014 against a published 0.488, and a civil-society value of 0.87 against a published 0.669. Because the error inflated the earlier baseline and left the later years roughly right, it exaggerated the measured decline. It ran in this project's own favour. Both columns are now the published V-Dem series verbatim. The UPA-decade DQI average falls from 0.59 to 0.57 and the 2014 value from 0.54 to 0.49. The 2026 value is unchanged at 0.29, and the eight-of-nine cross-era result is unaffected.
Correction: The international comparison had its 2014 column on V-Dem's Electoral Democracy Index and its 2026 column on the Liberal Democracy Index, two different instruments read as one series. India's decline was shown as 0.71 → 0.26. The like-for-like figure on the Liberal Democracy Index is 0.488 → 0.260. All five countries are now on the same index throughout. India's proportional fall drops from 63% to 47%, and Turkey's is now the steeper of the two. India retains the largest absolute fall in the cohort. The multi-country chart was also labelled 'DQI', which was wrong. The DQI is constructed for India alone and cannot be computed for the others. The chart is now labelled as what it plots.
Added: A build check that fails unless the international table and the index's component table report the same V-Dem figure for India, which they can only do if both are on the same V-Dem index. The earlier consistency check could not have caught this, because it compares published documents against the dataset and both figures were in the dataset.
Fixed: The page was starting itself twice. Alpine calls a component's init automatically, and an extra x-init called it again: two requests for the dataset, two sets of event listeners, two chart initialisations. Because the 'live data unavailable' flag latched once set, a single dropped request out of the two was enough to raise that warning on a page whose data had in fact loaded.
Fixed: The dataset request now retries three times with backoff, and the warning banner carries a working retry button that clears itself if the retry succeeds. Previously one failed request left the banner up for the rest of the session with no way back.
Fixed: The site's main page is a single large file. If the transfer was cut part-way through (a dropped mobile connection, or an intermediary that truncates), the page came up looking almost normal but with computed figures silently blank: an empty scorecard, and a sentence reading 'On [nothing] cross-era measures'. There is now a check that detects a page which failed to start and says so, with a reload button.
Fixed: Index figures quoted in prose had drifted apart between sections. The SSI appeared as both 8.2 and 6.4, the FCI as both 0.68 and 0.80, the DQI as 0.40 in one place and 0.29 in another, and graduate unemployment as 27% and 28.5% against a dataset value of 26.5%. Every one of these is now read from the dataset at page load, so they cannot drift again.
Fixed: The animated timeline opened on 2014, where the SSI is 0.0, so the first thing the panel showed was 'SSI Score: 0', which reads as a broken figure. It now opens on the latest year, states which year it is showing, and explains what a zero SSI means. The index counts documented suppression episodes, and none had begun by 2014.
Correction: The headline growth figure was wrong. 'India's GDP grew at 6.8% annually since 2014' appeared in eight places across the site and the documents, and it is not what the published series says on any basis. The arithmetic mean for 2014-2026 is 6.1%, which is what the research paper has always reported, so the site's front page and its own paper disagreed. This error ran in the government's favour, and it was an error all the same. Every instance now reads 6.1%, with the ex-pandemic figure of 7.2% given alongside it so that the 2020 contraction does not quietly drive the comparison in either direction. The UPA comparison figure is corrected from 7.7% to 7.1% on the same basis.
Correction: The executive summary quoted India's press-freedom rank of 161 and labelled it 2024. 161 is the 2023 figure, and 2024 was 159. The metric panel now carries the latest year throughout (157 for 2026), and the consistency check has been widened to catch value-before-year phrasing, which is the ordering that had been hiding this one.
Changed: The same work was being cited five different ways across the site, with two different titles, two different years and a period of 2014-2025 that stopped a year before the data does. Everything now cites one form: Raman, V.S. (2026), Some Perspective: India's Political Economy, 2004-2026. The research paper keeps its own distinct title, as it should.
Fixed: A sitewide audit ran every page at desktop and phone width, checking for script errors, failed requests, broken links, duplicate identifiers, sideways scrolling, skipped heading levels, images without alternative text and touch targets below the minimum size. It found the methodology page scrolling sideways on a phone (a long formula and an unbreakable URL), contents links and tags too small to tap reliably, and heading levels skipping from h2 to h4 in four documents. All are fixed. Ninety-eight of a hundred page-and-screen combinations now come back completely clean. The two remaining are elements that are empty or hidden by design.
Fixed: Seven of the downloadable documents had no description, no canonical URL and no social-preview tags, so sharing a link to any of them produced a bare URL with no title or image. All seven now carry them.
Fixed: The retired research presentation declared the walkthrough as its canonical address while actually redirecting readers to the paper. It now points both at the paper.

2026-08-15 · v2.37.0

Correcting how we read the inflation result

The one measure that improved was being described too generously. It is not evidence of good policy, and the paper now says so.

Correction: Earlier wording called the fall in inflation 'the single most defensible economic achievement of the period' and attributed it to an institution being strengthened. That reads as crediting the government, and it does not survive scrutiny. The comparison straddles a global commodity cycle. Brent crude fell from about $115 a barrel in June 2014 to under $30 by January 2016, a fall of around 75%, driven by US shale supply and OPEC defending market share. India imports roughly 86% of its crude. A shock that size, arriving exactly at the boundary between the two periods, explains more of the gap than any change of government.
Changed: Where domestic policy did contribute, the mechanism was inflation targeting, a rule that constrains the executive's discretion. If that is the channel, it supports the project's argument. The 2026 figure also sits on the reweighted CPI basket, so it prints lower for the same price movements.
Added: A shareable chart of the three indices, 2004-2026, is now available as a PNG.

2026-08-15 · v2.36.0

Accessibility: touch targets and readable text on phones

Buttons, links and controls that were too small to tap reliably on a phone, and text as small as 9px, are fixed.

Fixed: Around forty interactive elements were smaller than the 44-pixel minimum on a phone. Chart download buttons and theme toggles were 28 pixels, footer links only 14 pixels tall, filter chips 27, and the trajectory sliders had a touch area just 4 pixels high. All now meet the minimum on touch devices.
Fixed: Text rendering as small as 9px on phones is raised to a 12px floor. No text on the site now renders below 12px on a phone.
Changed: These changes apply only to touch devices and narrow screens. The desktop layout keeps its existing density, because a mouse is precise and a fingertip is about ten millimetres across.
Note: Links inside a sentence and the tap-to-explain glossary terms are deliberately left at text size. Enlarging them would break the line spacing of every paragraph containing one, and the accessibility guidelines specifically exempt targets positioned by the flow of text.

2026-08-15 · v2.35.0

The theory chapter moves into the paper; two presentations retired

Original theoretical work that only existed inside a slide deck is now part of the research paper, and the two hand-maintained presentations have been withdrawn.

Added: The paper gains a section setting out where this work sits in the literature and what it adds. It offers a refinement of modernisation theory (growth can legitimise erosion as well as produce democracy), an extension of Levitsky and Way's competitive authoritarianism toward incremental and legal erosion, and a proposed concept, 'fiscal authoritarianism', which names the use of federal fiscal architecture to centralise power while leaving the constitution formally intact. It also gains a research agenda covering state-level variation, sectoral and social disaggregation, district-level indices, and comparative work.
Changed: The two presentation documents have been retired. Their content is now either in the paper or in the guided walkthrough, both of which stay in step with the dataset. The old links still work and redirect.
Changed: The paper's policy section now carries the fuller set of immediate and structural reforms, stated as directions the measurements point in. They are not costed proposals.

2026-08-15 · v2.34.0

A guided walkthrough, and a responsive audit

A new ten-minute guided tour of the evidence, and fixes for layout problems that made several documents unusable on a phone.

Added: A guided walkthrough at /walkthrough/. Its seventeen slides take you from the question through the evidence to what follows, with seven live charts. Keyboard, swipe and click navigation all work, and each slide has its own link. Every figure is read from the dataset when the page loads, so the deck cannot fall out of step with the data the way a slide deck normally does.
Fixed: Tables in the downloadable documents had no way to scroll on a narrow screen, so on a phone they pushed the whole page sideways, by more than 400 pixels in the technical appendix. Tables now scroll inside their own container.
Fixed: The Economic Trajectory sliders had a fixed width that overflowed the smallest phones.
Changed: The site was audited at eight screen widths from 320 to 1920 pixels across every page type. Results and remaining gaps are recorded in the repository.

2026-08-15 · v2.33.0

The research paper, and a correction to a headline inequality figure

The full working paper is published. An error in our own summary documents, one that ran in this project's favour, is corrected in the open.

Added: 'Growth Without Accountability: Measuring India's Institutional and Distributional Transformation, 2004-2026' is a 15,000-word working paper, available to read online or as a 43-page PDF. It documents the measurement problem, specifies how the three indices are built, reports the results, tests them against an independent study, and states the limitations at length.
Correction: Four of this project's summary documents stated the 2014 top 1% income share as 15%, which made inequality appear to rise by 7.6 percentage points to 2023. That figure is wrong. 15.0% is the 2014 bottom 50% share, and the two series had been crossed. The World Inequality Database series this project follows has 21.3%, making the rise 1.3 points. The documents are corrected, and the framing now rests on two facts that are true and make a stronger case. The top 1% share is at its highest level since 1922, and the bottom half of the population lost roughly an eighth of its share of national income in twelve years.
Changed: An automated check now compares every year-labelled figure in the published documents against the source dataset on each change, so a contradiction of this kind cannot pass silently again.
Added: The research package now delivers what it advertised: a complete ZIP with every document, the paper, the dataset and the replication code, plus CSV and Excel exports.

2026-08-15 · v2.31.0

An independent check, August data, and three rendering fixes

Added an external study that reaches this project's governance conclusion by a different method, refreshed the data to August 2026, and fixed three display bugs. One of them had been hiding a chart's data entirely.

Added: An independent-corroboration section in Methodology covering Grier & Grier (2026), 'Promises, Promises'. They build a synthetic-control counterfactual over 1984-2013, and this project builds composite indices from observed series. The methods differ and the conclusions converge. The section states the points of disagreement openly.
Data: CPI 2026 updated to 4.45% (MoSPI July 2026). Unemployment re-cited to the June 2026 PLFS bulletin. The headline 5.5% was unchanged.
Correction: MoSPI replaced the CPI 2012=100 index with 2024=100 from the January 2026 print, reweighting on HCES 2023-24. Food's weight fell from 45.86% to 36.75%, so headline CPI now responds less to a food-price shock than it used to. The 2026 figure is not on the same basis as 2014-2025, and it is now labelled as such. It is no longer silently spliced onto the older series.
Fixed: The Era Comparison detail chart had been rendering with no data line at all. A colour rule matched none of its points and made the whole series transparent. It now draws correctly, split into NDA-I and NDA-II.
Fixed: On phones the whole site was zooming out because one wide element stretched the page to roughly three times the viewport width. All fourteen tabs now fit a phone screen properly.
Fixed: Era shading and policy-event markers on the Interactive Data chart were never drawing.
Security: The two third-party scripts the site loads are now pinned with integrity hashes, so a substituted file on the CDN cannot execute.

2026-07-07 · v2.30.1

July data refresh

Routine refresh against the public releases available in early July 2026.

Data: Unemployment 2026 revised 5.1% to 5.5% (PLFS Monthly Bulletin, May 2026). CPI 2026 set to 3.93%.
Changed: Stale-date detection in CI widened, and the build's checkout action pinned to a single version across both workflows.

2026-06-18 · v2.30.0

Stylesheet precompiled; runtime CDN retired

The site stopped compiling its stylesheet in the browser on every visit and now ships a prebuilt one, with a guard so it cannot silently fall out of date.

Changed: Tailwind is compiled ahead of time into a committed stylesheet. It used to be generated at page load. The page now paints sooner and loads one fewer third-party script.

2026-06-18 · v2.28.0

Indices rebuilt: COVID undercount, NSO merger, GST

The three constructed indices were rebuilt from a single canonical script so both political eras are computed identically.

Changed: The Statistical Suppression Index now includes the COVID mortality undercount and the NSO merger. The Fiscal Centralisation Index now treats GST as a structural shift in state taxing power as well as counting cesses.
Method: Both the UPA and NDA decades are now generated by the same script, so no difference between the eras can come from how they were computed.

Full technical detail for every release, including internal refactors not listed here, is in CHANGELOG.md.