My work at IndiaSpend involved tracking of government expenditures and deliverables pertaining to different schemes that affected vulnerable populations. Policy based investigations such as these taught me to navigate multiple sources to acquire relevant data. Looking for discrepancies in policy implementation taught me to perceive loopholes that can otherwise be obfuscated with elaborate presentations. I also learned nuances of how to make data presentation lucid for the target audience, who won’t necessarily be academically inclined.

My job as a researcher in a journalistic setup can be summarised in three main points - Maintain fake news database, conducting research on misinformation, and writing articles on a periodic basis. Fake news Database - Designing a database from scratch requires setting ground-rules for standardisation, while accounting for unique trends characteristic of the demographic in question. Since we were creating a database for misinformation in India, the requirement was to not only standardise it for use by other researchers but also designing new categories and variables to capture the uniqueness in that phenomena in India. Conducting research - Based on social experiments and data acquired from above, conducting research could be termed as the 'end goal' of my position in the company. One project I was a part of dealt with the question of relative public engagement upon exposure to fake news and fact-checks simutaneously. It was designed to understand the notion of 'incentives' in the context of news consumption in Gujarat in the backdrop of the assembly elections there. Article writing - Weekly, monthly and annual reports of mis-/dis-information trends we identified and countered.

My job description at I-PAC can be summarised in two broad points - Organising election campaigns and creating political database. Organising election campaigns entails - 1) Establishing rapport with local political stakeholders, 2) Coordinating between different tiers of political management to organise public outreach exercises (street corners, rallies, demonstrations, protest marches etc.), 3) Gauging political stakes of political opponents and design means of personnel negotiations, & 4) Design and manage election campaign based activities e.g., establishing tiers of party organisation (panchayat, block, district, municipality-based). My other task involved of database management involved - 1) Identifying key stakeholders and analysing their election profile, 2) Maintaining a campaign history of constituency to identify determining factors that influence voting patters & 3) Establishing demographic profile of the constituency.