About the data

Where the numbers come from

Every figure is drawn from public sources — chiefly the Union Budget, Reserve Bank of India, line ministries (Road Transport, Railways, Power, Health, Defence, Electronics & IT and others), ISRO, the Ministry of External Affairs, PNGRB, NITI Aayog, the Census and national surveys (NFHS, UDISE+), and international bodies such as the World Bank and IMF. The specific source is named on every sector page, under the chart.

Years we cannot source

Official series are often sparse: a ministry publishes a figure for 2014 and another for 2022 and nothing in between. Our charts draw a bar for every year in the range so the shape of the series reads correctly, but a year the source does not publish is drawn as a hollow, dashed bar carrying no number, and the chart says so beneath it. Hovering such a year shows the value prefixed with a tilde, because it is a line drawn between two published points rather than a measurement. The CSV you can download from any sector contains only the published years.

Achieved figures versus targets

A built kilometre and a promised kilometre are different things, and we never plot them on the same line. Charts carry only what has actually been delivered and reported. Where a government target exists it appears separately, labelled as a target with its deadline — so a sector may show 2,843 km of freight corridor built while naming a projected saving as a projection, not an achievement.

What the figures are current to

Every sector page shows a “Data current to” line. Where the source states an “as on” date we show that date; where it does not, we show the last year the series covers; where we know neither, we show nothing rather than a guess. That line is deliberately not the date we last edited the page — a corrected typo is not new data. The same date drives the sitemap, so search engines see a change only when the figures actually move.

When a source revises a number

Governments revise. Base years change, provisional figures become final, and a count can fall because duplicates were removed rather than because anything was lost. Our rule is to follow the source and to say so: we restate the series to the revised basis rather than keep a flattering older number, and where a basis change makes two years genuinely incomparable we say that on the page instead of drawing a line across the break. Two examples on this site: UDISE+ moved to individual student records in 2022-23 and the Ministry states its data is not comparable with earlier years, so the school page does not chart enrolment across that break; and the Amrit Sarovar total drifts slightly downward as duplicate entries are deleted, so that sector is a timeline rather than a rising line.

When we get it wrong

We publish our corrections. Every data error we find or are told about is listed, with its date, what was wrong, what it is now, and the source that settled it. That list is the changelog. A project that documents a government's record has to be correctable in public, or it is advertising. If you think a figure is wrong, send it with a public source and we will check it.

Verified and estimated figures

Sectors whose series we have traced to an official document are marked “verified”. Sectors resting on industry estimates, illustrative curves or figures we have not yet traced to a primary document are marked as estimates, so the basis for every number is visible. Not every sector yet links directly to its source document; adding those links, sector by sector, is ongoing work.

Why 2014 to today

This site documents what has been built in India since 2014, under the BJP-led NDA government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. That is the window because that is where the step-change in delivery happens: capital spending up roughly six-fold, national highways from about 91,000 to over 146,000 km, rail electrification from 21,801 to 69,873 route km, airports from 74 to 165, every village electrified, and crores of families given a toilet, a gas connection, a bank account and health cover — alongside a digital payments system the rest of the world now studies. India Unfolding is an independent project: it carries no advertising, receives no funding from any government body or organisation, and is built and maintained by one person. Its purpose is to put that decade's record in one place, sourced and in full.

Keeping it current

India's numbers change constantly, and new official data arrives throughout the year. We update figures periodically, but some may lag the very latest release — which is exactly why every page is dated. If you spot something out of date, please tell us with a public source and we'll review and correct it.

Bilingual by design

The entire site is published in both English and Hindi, because this is a story that belongs to all of India. Switch languages any time from the header.