Stories Behind Statistics

From India’s linguistic diversity to the number of Indians paying income tax, the likely fallouts of the current census, and how migrants are driving India’s economy, there is one ‘go-to book’: 100 Ways to See India: Stats, Stories and Surprises by Rohit Saran. It helps place facts in perspective, demolish many a shibboleth, and offer fresh insights into the many things that define the everyday reality of the world’s fastest-growing economy.

Statistics are boring and, more often than not, put the reader to sleep, but this book is different. Each data set is accompanied by an easy-to-understand graph or chart and a story that makes one pause, think, and say, ‘I didn’t know that!’. The illustrations challenge assumptions on both sides of the ideological spectrum, for, as Joan Robinson said about India, ‘whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is equally true’.

Let’s start with language. During the last census (of 2011), Indians listed 1,95,691 mother tongues to their enumerators, multiple times the officially listed 22 languages in the Eighth Schedule. By August next year, when the results of the next count are published, we will know whether this number has gone down or remained constant. Although Hindi is understood by 57 per cent (69 crore) of the population, only 52 crore speak it as their first language. The rate of population growth has certainly been arrested, and by 2050, India’s population graph will also start its downward journey. In percentage terms, all religions, except Islam, have declined; Islam has increased from 9.8 per cent to 15.2 per cent from 1951 to 2025. When it comes to political power, we have to go granular and look at legislators in state and UT assemblies. The BJP holds 40 per cent of the MLAs, followed by 38.4 per cent of the regional and Left parties. This leaves the Congress with less than 22 per cent of political representation at the state level. Contrary to popular perception, India is not a vegetarian country—over 87 per cent of men and 75 per cent of women relish meat, though large numbers avoid beef and pork. However, poultry has expanded 12 times—Indians are eating more eggs and broilers than ever before.

Getting into India’s civil services is tougher than making it to Harvard or becoming an astronaut with NASA. Interestingly, while 76 per cent of aspirants come from engineering, science, or medicine, 85 per cent choose four optional papers—political science, geography, sociology, and anthropology. Although more men appear for the exam than women, their success ratio is substantially higher. In fact, since 2010, girls have been out-enrolling boys in schools. But when it comes to dating, women prefer those closer to their age cohort, while men show a marked preference for younger women. When Shah Rukh Khan debuted in Bollywood in 1992, his future co-star Deepika Padukone was all of six years old.

Let us now look at some of the great ironies of India. In 2011, over eleven million urban homes were vacant, even as many times that number were living in unauthorised JJ clusters. We are told that globally, cities like Vancouver and Washington, D.C., tax empty houses to promote affordable rentals. Should India follow suit? Meanwhile, five states—Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Uttar Pradesh—are all vying with each other to become India’s first trillion-dollar state.

The report also celebrates India’s partial victory over inflation. In each decade after Independence, India saw at least two years of double-digit inflation. But after 2015, the RBI and the government signed a landmark agreement to formally keep inflation in check, setting a goal of 4 per cent per annum, with an upper limit of 6 per cent in extraordinary circumstances. Most economists agree that price stability is the forerunner to prosperity. But measuring prosperity is not as simple as it may appear. There is notional per capita GDP, inflation-adjusted GDP, GDP with respect to USD, and GDP with respect to PPP, and it is by the latter count that India becomes a middle-income country in terms of the affordability of goods and services. It is also interesting to note that at the time of the Kargil war, Pakistan’s per capita income was higher than India’s; by 2005, it was equal, and now it is less than half. The war on poverty is certainly one that Pakistan has lost to India—without a single bullet being fired.

In fact, mobile phones and data are perhaps the cheapest in India—for the cost of mobile data fell by over 90 per cent in the last decade, thereby spiking data consumption by a factor of over 656 per cent. Another interesting data set is about the average spending of a foreign tourist in India vis-à-vis Europe. The European and trans-Atlantic visitor takes longer to come to India and, therefore, spends more time here than they would in a neighbouring country.

We now come to the great poverty dilemma of India. By June 2025, India had eliminated absolute poverty, and on December 1, 2025, Kerala became the first state to declare itself ‘poverty-free’. However, even as India has significantly reduced the number of poor people, inequality—rather, extreme inequality—is on the rise, which is a larger policy issue for the political economy to dwell upon. One consequence of poverty is that people ‘vote with their feet’: they migrate to greener pastures. This explains why Delhi is Bihar’s second-largest city, just as Toronto is for Punjabis. Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand also continue to be states with high birth rates—and they will supply labour to Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Punjab. Soon, surnames like Jha, Paswan, Mandal, and Yadav will be on the electoral rolls of these states, even as migrants learn to speak Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, and Punjabi with flourish and contest for seats in municipal councils and legislative assemblies.

The entries on sports also make for a fascinating read. That India dominates cricket is well known, but it is in the game of chess that India has made real strides. In 1990, India had just one grandmaster—Viswanathan Anand. Today, India has over 90 grandmasters, and in November 2025, it was the only country in the world with three men in the top ten in classical chess—aged 19, 20, and 22. Women have not lagged behind, and we have two dozen of them as well. With India making a pitch for the 2036 Olympics, the country is gearing up to prove its mettle as a sporting nation too.

Last, but not least, the book tells us where to access big data. It lists the Parliament, RBI, Census of India, MoSPI, the Ministries of Health, Agriculture, and Education, NCRB, the World Bank, and NITI Aayog websites, along with popular search engines like Google and social media platforms like X as sources. But none of them will give you half the joy that this book does.

Go ahead, grab a copy, and win any quiz on India!