From Rani to 10,000 Women: Reclaiming Survey Data as a Public Good

-Speakers: Rohit Nema and Antara Rai Chowdhury

• What this talk is about We share an ongoing collaboration between IIHS and the Rajasthan Mahila Kaamgaar Union (RMKU), a 15-year-old union of domestic and informal women workers in Rajasthan. RMKU has painstakingly documented thousands of workers, including a cross-section survey of 10,000 domestic workers, yet much of this data remains inaccessible because of weak protocols for sharing insights and limited skills to read and question it. To address this, we tried two new ways of communicating data back to the union. We use a fictional composite character, Rani, a domestic worker facing low and delayed wages, debt, housing insecurity, child illness, and constant fear of job loss, as an entry point into the dataset. We follow her story and then slowly zoom out to show how patterns of age, migration, tenure in the city, and union reach appear in aggregate data on 10,000+ women across Jaipur’s nine Assembly constituencies and 42 meeting areas, while also familiarising readers with standard charts and gradually building basic data literacy.

-Why this matters for the VizChitra community Three linked problems sit at the heart of this work:

1. The invisibility of grassroots data Even with rich data, RMKU has rarely treated it as evidence in policy conversations or media narratives about cities and labour. Even within the union, this data has not always translated into everyday organising decisions.
2. Chart inaccessibility and fear of technical visuals. Organisers and members are deeply familiar with the lives behind the numbers, but charts and maps often feel intimidating, or disconnected from experience. This creates a paradox: the people closest to the data are the least able to use the tools that claim to represent them.
3. Aggregates without people Visualisations of the city often start from bird’s-eye views in terms of aggregates, and only later lead to the worker. In our work, we reverse this order: we begin with a story like Rani’s and then reveal how many others share her plight. For the VizChitra community, this talk offers a grounded case of what it means to reclaim data and data insights created with people as a public good, and to design visual narratives that remain accessible to the people whose lives they summarise.

-Who is the audience for this session This session is for people who work with data on people’s lives and want it to matter to the communities it describes. It targets researcher–practitioners, including students, journalists, civic-tech designers, organisers in unions/NGOs/collectives, and educators who want to turn datasets into clear, accessible stories that support organising and decision-making.

-Takeaway for participants Participants can expect three broad takeaways from this session:

1. A grounded sense of how a worker-led union like RMKU uses its own data for day-to-day administration, planning, and monitoring, to spot key patterns and turn them into organising questions and decisions.
2. This can also be considered as a repeatable template for others who like to replicate the data work at grassroots level for decision making and making data more accessible to the real users.
3. Practical ideas, tailored to their own contexts, for moving from treating data as a closed expert asset to treating it as a public good that communities can read, question, and act on together.

-Summating idea For us, RMKU is not a one-off case but a proof of concept for a way of seeing, from person to pattern and back, that can travel to other unions and movements wherever data awaits reclaiming as a public good.