An index of open-source work on development research, data and policy. Twenty-five public repositories by Varna Sri Raman, most of them about India, grouped by what they are for. Each one has a status label; the labels are defined below and in the maintenance policy.
Teaching and practice platform for development economics and social research: courses, case studies and open teaching material.
Open ↗ janvayu.inA citizen-led national archive of India's air quality crisis: data, stories and sensor readings.
Open ↗ whatcounts.inCompanion site to the forthcoming Routledge book on India's eight decades of counting itself.
Open ↗This site is an index. It holds no code or data of its own; every link goes to a repository on GitHub or to a live site built from one.
It started in 2025 as the home page for eight related "stacks". Five of them are in use and are listed under research toolkits. The other three (RootStack, BridgeStack and ViewStack) were a database, an API and a dashboard that the toolkits did not need; they are archived and listed at the bottom of the page.
Every repository has one of the four labels on the right. The maintenance policy says what each label commits the maintainer to. Code is MIT-licensed unless a repository says otherwise; some written material is under Creative Commons. Each repository stands on its own, with its own README and no shared dependency.
Being worked on. Issues and pull requests get a reply within days.
Works as described and is not being developed. Bug reports are welcome and may wait weeks for a reply. New features are unlikely.
Unfinished, and shared as it is. Prototypes are not indexed here; they stay in the Experiments sandbox until they get a repository of their own or are dropped.
Archived on GitHub and read-only. Kept public so that links, citations and forks continue to work.
205 state-level choropleth maps and 10 visual stories on India's diversity across demography, health, gender, economy, education and environment.
howindialives.impactmojo.inAuto-updating tracker of Indian government policy across development sectors. The maintained successor to PolicyStack.
github.com/Varnasr/PolicyDharaAnalysis of Bihar electoral roll anomalies: voter deletion patterns, demographic shifts and election data integrity.
forindia.netlify.appIndia's progress on all 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals: scores, trends, radar charts and category breakdowns.
sdgtracker.impactmojo.in · github.com/Varnasr/sdg-progress-trackerInteractive dashboard across economic, health, education, infrastructure and environmental indicators, pulling live from the World Bank Open Data API.
devindicators.impactmojo.in · github.com/Varnasr/india-development-indicatorsSatellite-verified, facility-level greenhouse-gas emissions for India: power, manufacturing, transport, fossil fuels, agriculture and waste, including the top-emitting coal and steel plants.
climatetrace.impactmojo.in · github.com/Varnasr/climate-trace-indiaOpen geographic database of 444 major Adani and Ambani infrastructure projects, 1999 to 2026, searchable and filterable, with government-support classification.
industrygroups.impactmojo.in · github.com/Varnasr/industry-conglomerates-databaseCitizen-led accountability archive asking who authorised the use of state power against citizens. A six-state evidence grammar, a chain-of-command map and an RTI register with a live reply-due clock.
whogavetheorder.netlify.appUnfunded empirical study of India's political economy, 2004 to 2026. Three constructed indices, the full dataset, replication code and a working paper.
someperspective.infoFive old-city seats, one winner since 1999, and still the poorest part of Hyderabad. Ward-level census data shows the gap is in work and income rather than services or slums: water and drainage are at full parity, but a third fewer people have jobs. The only gaps that closed since 2011 were closed by national schemes. Includes a run of the standard causal test, which cannot answer either way from public data.
varnasr.github.io/Hyderabad-Electoral-AnalysisInteractive bilingual resource on Bihar: society, economy, caste, migration, climate, culture. A single offline-capable HTML file.
github.com/Varnasr/BiharParichay-Project200 real development case studies from 117 countries, searchable, filterable and fully cited.
github.com/Varnasr/dev-case-studiesA curated open-access library of 500+ research papers, books and grey literature for practitioners in South Asia.
varnasr.github.io/development-discoursesRealistic practice datasets for development economics: 10 generators producing 350k+ rows for teaching and training.
github.com/Varnasr/devdata-practice11 interactive Shiny apps for impact evaluation, poverty analysis, program design and data exploration.
github.com/Varnasr/deveconomics-toolkitDevelopment-sector glossary and companion to Impact Mojo: 390+ terms merged from 20 course lexicons, with 5 case studies, 10 worked formulae and cross-references to where each term is taught. Offline-capable PWA.
impactmojo.in/impactlexThe largest of the set. MEL calculators, visual frameworks, research documentation templates and a full econometrics module (DiD, PSM, IV/2SLS, RDD, sensitivity analysis). Has a DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15245182.
github.com/Varnasr/InsightStackThe applied fieldwork lifecycle: survey design, sample size, sampling weights, complex survey analysis, cost-effectiveness, qualitative coding and batch Quarto reporting.
github.com/Varnasr/FieldStackDevelopment data workflows across health, gender, education and climate equity. An impact evaluation module and a data-cleaning pipeline with automatic logging.
github.com/Varnasr/EquityStackSouth Asia policy tracker: 15 flagship schemes, 4 years of budget data and performance indicators. Superseded for new work by PolicyDhara.
github.com/Varnasr/PolicyStackCompanion archive for the Research Rundown newsletter: issues, featured tools, method spotlights and curated resources.
github.com/Varnasr/SignalStackCompanion site for the forthcoming Routledge book on India's quest for social progress through eight decades of measurement.
github.com/Varnasr/the-measurement-trapAn illustrated speculative fiction novel set in a climate-collapsed India, following a 14-year-old girl through AI, memory and resistance.
postheroic.worldCSV to LaTeX to PDF generator for uniform, privacy-masked candidate dossiers. Runs via Netlify Functions or Overleaf.
github.com/Varnasr/CandidateDossierThe sandbox. Small browser tools are built and indexed there, and are not listed here; anything that lasts moves to a repository of its own and appears on this page.
varnasr-experiments.netlify.app · github.com/Varnasr/ExperimentsNothing matches that. Clear the search or the status filter.
SQLite and PostgreSQL schemas for the shared data layer.
FastAPI backend serving RootStack to frontends.
React dashboard for exploring the data.
These three were a database, an API and a dashboard, built as one pipeline. It cost the most to maintain, was used the least, and the research toolkits never depended on it.
ImpactLex is not on this list. Its old repository is archived, but the project graduated into Impact Mojo rather than winding down; it is listed under Teaching and practice above. An archived repository and a finished project are not the same thing.
Four further stacks (ClimateStack, EduStack, SocialStack and InfraStack) sat on a published roadmap for a year without a line of code written. That roadmap has been withdrawn rather than left standing as a promise to readers. The needs behind it are better served by How India Lives, PolicyDhara and JanVayu.
Analysis tools for monitoring and evaluation, impact assessment and programme design.
Scripts, sample data and evaluation frameworks from fieldwork in South Asia.
Python, R and Stata templates for the data formats the sector uses.
Practice datasets, notebooks, case studies and worked examples for development economics and public policy courses.
Development economist, social researcher and licensed social justice worker. Twenty years of work on public health, education, gender and climate in India and South Asia.
Has led programme design, evaluation and research for Oxfam, UNICEF, the Gates Foundation, PLAN India and BBC Media Action. Founder of StoryWell Books.
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