Vinayak Krishnan

VINAYAK KRISHNAN, then a graduate student at University of Sussex, Hove, England, was approved funding in April 2024 to aid research on “The Social Production of Statistics: Analysing Tacit Knowledge and Political Economy of the Customized Surveying Industry in India,” supervised by Dr. Geert De Neve, This doctoral project is an ethnography of the private industry for customized socio-economic surveying in India. While national statistics have long been made publicly available by the state, researchers and international development professionals have begun collecting customized socio-economic data on a range of academic and policy questions, through mechanisms such as Randomized Controlled Trials and impact evaluations. The fieldwork for this project took place between August 2024-2025 and was primarily conducted in Delhi. It involved interviews with the elite actors of this industry, such as survey firm founders and managers, as well as their clients including economists, bureaucrats and consultants. Further, the grantee conducted immersive participant-observation with enumerators hired by these firms for local data collection from respondents. This fieldwork has yielded deep insights into the political economy of these forms of knowledge and the ideological frameworks that guide the work of elite development professionals. It has also provided rich data on the social background of enumerators, their precarious work conditions and the intricate forms of tacit skill they employ during survey work. It thus seeks to highlight the social and material foundations of statistical data, which is often missed in technocratic policy discussions.