About the observatory
The India Health Observatory is a public reference for India’s health data. It collects what government bodies publish, keeps the original files, and reports what changed, where, and how unusual it is.
What it is for
India publishes a great deal of health data, spread across portals, PDFs and spreadsheets, on different schedules and under different names. The observatory puts it in one place, in one consistent form, without changing a single published value. Its contribution is the comparison: this week against the same week last year, this year against the usual range, this state against India.
The rules it keeps
- No number without a source. Every figure links to the release it came from, the archived file, the original address and the place in the document.
- Code computes; nothing invents. Change sentences are written by fixed templates from stored values. No model writes a number.
- Honest freshness. Every layer says which period it describes and when it was fetched. Nothing is presented as real-time.
- One score, built in the open. The 0 to 100 health score uses fixed goalposts and equal system weights, all published, and every ring shows how it was made.
- Fail loudly. A release that fails validation is rejected whole and shown as rejected. Nothing partial is published.
Coverage
The first version covers India and its 36 states and union territories, from four sources: disease outbreaks reported through IDSP, air quality from CPCB monitoring stations, health-service data from HMIS, and mortality and fertility from the Sample Registration System. District pages and further sources, including NFHS, come later. See sources for what is live and how current it is.
Citing the observatory
Every page with numbers has a citation ready to copy. In running text, name the observatory, the place and the period:
“According to the India Health Observatory, [what changed] in [state or India] in [period].”
For the underlying figure, cite the original publisher too; each indicator page names it. Charts can be embedded with the code on each indicator page, and every series downloads as CSV with its release and locator.
Licence
The source data is published by Indian government bodies under the Government Open Data License – India. The observatory reproduces it with attribution and without alteration.