Genome of India

Genome of India is a Substack newsletter by Saket Choudhary, who runs a computational biology lab at IIT Bombay. Each essay takes one question about Indian life, often a personal one, and answers it with the country’s large administrative health datasets, showing the charts and the working along the way.

Two essays give a good sense of the approach:

• Wake me up when August ends (May 2024) starts from the author’s memory that an unusual number of classmates in Rajasthan had August birthdays. It uses HMIS birth records from 2008 to 2020 and IMD gridded temperature data to show that births in India peak in September and October, that conceptions cluster in the cooler months, and that the link with temperature holds in 24 of 28 states.
• The pulse of the nation and the law of large numbers (August 2025) uses HMIS, the Civil Registration System and NFHS-5 to trace how births have moved from homes to hospitals: home births fell from about 30% in 2008 to 3% in 2024, private hospitals now handle roughly half of all deliveries, and caesarean rates there approach 50%. It also flags rising preterm births in several states.

The essays are a useful model for anyone working with HMIS or SRS data, and they draw on the open tools from the same lab, such as BharatViz for state maps.