India Impact Map

The ground situation of the country, and everything the ecosystem is doing about it, on one map.

Summary in a nutshell

My mission

Where the need is greatest and where the work is already happening should be visible in a single glance — so effort goes where it is needed, not where it is known.

Wishlist from our ecosystem

These are the things people in this ecosystem wish they had.

Someone designing a programme

Has a cause, a budget and a district in mind. Needs to know if any of that is the right choice.

An organisation working on the ground

Doing the work. Largely invisible outside the districts it operates in.

A funder deciding where to put money

Wants to fund where it is needed most, and has no reliable way to tell where that is.

5 wishes. Grant the ones you would.

The government data has been public for years and the work has been happening for decades. What has never existed is one place where you could look at both at the same time.

The loop it is stuck in

Five quantities, in the same order in both states. Watch the second arrow — it is the only thing that changes.

The scattered view

One negative link. The more work happens, the harder the whole is to see.

1 negative link

Work happening on the ground

Where it gets recorded

Each organisation’s own reports

How visible the whole picture is

How well effort matches need

Confidence a place is worth funding

1
Work happening on the ground
+leads to
2
Where it gets recorded
Each organisation’s own reports
−leads to
3
How visible the whole picture is
+leads to
4
How well effort matches need
+leads to
5
Confidence a place is worth funding
+back to the top
B
The scattered viewOne negative link. The more work happens, the harder the whole is to see.

The one change

Record the work against the need, on the same map.

Look at the second link. Every organisation records its work properly — in its own reports, against its own framing. So the more work the sector does, the more separate accounts of it exist, and the harder the country becomes to read as a whole. Diligence makes the picture worse.

Which is why nobody experiences this as a failure. Each organisation’s reporting is fine. The loop balances, and settles at a level where everyone can see their own district and no one can see the map.

Record it against shared indicators, in one place, and that link changes sign. More projects then mean a sharper national picture instead of a noisier one — and where the need is high and the map is empty stops being a hunch and becomes a finding.

Now go and see how they’re grantedThis page is the what and the why. The product is the how.