How to Help

Tracks every bill in Parliament, in plain English, with the text, the debate and the voting record. If you have ever wanted to know what was actually passed rather than what was announced, this is where you look. The novel’s Curriculum Division rewrites five years of history in a single notice; PRS exists so that the real version stays legible while it is still happening.

Litigates and campaigns on surveillance, facial recognition, and the laws that govern them in India. They file the RTIs and the petitions that P.A.I. would have made impossible. Much of what the book imagines as settled — biometric gates, compliance scoring, opaque algorithms deciding access — is being argued over right now, and IFF is doing the arguing.

Long-form reporting on the rule of law, named for the constitutional right to equality. The book’s Resistance fights with documentation and doubt rather than fire; this is what that looks like when it is a job.

Drafts and critiques the actual text of Indian law, including on environment and data protection. The DPDP Act that governs how this very site handles your email is the kind of thing they work on.

Public interest litigation on governance, police reform and accountability, running since 1980. The book’s police station scenes are comic until they are not; this is the organisation that takes the not-funny version to court.

Documents evictions and demolitions in India, and argues housing as a right. Vikram’s file names the Bhubaneshwar Evictions in a single line. HLRN is what the full version of that line looks like.

Delhi’s most persistent source of actual numbers on air quality, waste and industrial emissions — including on waste-to-energy plants, which is the part of this novel that is not speculative at all. Their work is why anyone can argue about stack readings with a figure in hand.

Documents every ongoing land conflict in India — who is being displaced, by which project, and under what law. Thakur GreenWorks is fiction. The pattern it is built from is a database.

Community air-quality monitoring in India — sensors, readings, and the work of turning a number into something a neighbourhood can act on. Kishanganj’s environmental snapshot lists PM2.5 at 312 as a line item. JanVayu is people measuring the real thing, in the real places, and refusing to let it stay abstract.

Tracks dams, rivers and water policy across South Asia. The 2055 flood in the novel is the Teesta turning eastern India into a marshy wasteland; SANDRP is the standing record of what actually gets built on rivers and what it does downstream.

CSE’s fortnightly, and the most consistent environmental reporting in the country. Where the waste-to-energy arguments in this book came from originally.

Gets climate science into Indian newsrooms, which is the unglamorous middle step between research and anyone knowing about it. The novel is about what happens when that step stops working.

An Indian youth climate collective, and a good first door if you are young and want something to do rather than something to read.

The global school strike movement, with active Indian chapters. Sumati is fourteen and nobody asks her to be a witness; the story makes her one anyway. This is the version where you volunteer.

Environmental journalism from the places it is happening rather than from a desk. A good way to find out what is going on near you, which is usually the first step to doing anything about it.

Biodiversity conservation and community research in the northeast — floods, wildlife, and the people living with both. Myaknju’s landscape is that part of the country, and it is not background scenery.

A free library in Bansa village, Hardoi district, Uttar Pradesh, started in 2020 and open to anyone — no bar on age, gender, caste or class. It grew from fifty books to five thousand and now reaches across fifty-four villages. Mr Mehta’s library in this novel is not a metaphor. It is this, carried forward.

The research programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, running since 2000 on media, information and the contemporary. It works by distributed fellowships and by building an archive — field notes, images, films, audio, periodicals — rather than by producing conclusions. The archivists in this book work the way Sarai works.

A crowdsourced visual archive of the posters, placards and photography of India’s protest movements, curated by Dr Manmohan Singh Fellows. Faces are taped over before anything is published, because the point is the signage and not the people holding it. Varna Sri Raman runs it — you can add photographs to it. The Hindu interviewed Pallavi Nayak and her about it under the headline When protest becomes memory.

A public record of police use of force in India, and of who authorised it. It holds a hard line that most reporting does not: an office with the power to order something is not an office shown to have ordered it. Documents are checked against originals, and official silence is filed too, with the date the answer was due. Another of the author’s projects, and anyone can add a document.

Where the author writes about measurement, policy and power — the non-fiction version of this novel’s argument. Her forthcoming book from Routledge, The Measurement Trap, has its own home at whatcounts.in.