Philip Merrill College of Journalism | University of Maryland

Indian Journalist Unearths Wild Computer Data

Reporter Rema Nagarajan (2005-06) holds government to account with computer-assisted reporting techniques

Eight men died while receiving abortions in Delhi in 2005, according to city record keepers, and another 104 men died from complications while trying to give birth. Malaria killed an additional 30,000 residents, a staggering number that would have signaled a health crisis – if it were at all accurate.

When Times of India reporter and Humphrey Fellowship alumna Rema Nagarajan discovered these irregularities in the city’s death registry, she took her findings back to the official who had granted her access to the data. “Was he embarrassed!” she wrote in an e-mail from Delhi. “No one had ever checked his database in detail, including himself, and this was the first time that someone had pointed out such glaring errors.”

Nagarajan got the database hoping to do a profile of diseases in Delhi, but in the end did not write a story because the data proved too unreliable, the result of human error and computer glitches. However, her work served as a wake-up call to government officials. “Delhi is the first city to experiment with computerization of the birth and death registry. Other cities want to replicate the system and then, of course, it can hopefully be implemented for the whole country,” she said. “However, before replicating, the Delhi system has to deal with the difficulties and glitches than can happen when trying something like this.”

The computer-assisted reporting (CAR) skills Nagarajan picked up during her Humphrey Fellowship at the University of Maryland have opened doors for her as a reporter. Without CAR, she said she “would never have dared to sift through such a huge table of numbers,” which contained the details of 75,000 deaths.

Soon after Nagarajan completed her fellowship in 2006, The Times of India, the country’s largest English daily, hired her to work on a special team where she could use her new-found CAR abilities to do long-term investigative stories. She went on to break a major national story about a prominent elected official who appeared to quadruple her net worth in three years, which Nagarajan found out by comparing data on the official’s declared assets during two election campaigns. Her story put the official in more trouble with India's income tax department, which was already investigating her, Nagarajan said.

In another effort, she learned by comparing two different sets of census data that some states were inflating their number of households in poverty in order to receive more money from the federal government. While she did not write a story on it, Nagarajan said that “some officials in the ministry were very impressed that I could study their vast database and analyze it. I think they respected me a lot more because of that. A few of them became very good sources.”

Professor Ira Chinoy teaches CAR at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism. With more than 20 years of CAR experience, Chinoy has been on two Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative teams, one at The Providence (R.I) Journal and the other at The Washington Post, where he served as director of computer-assisted reporting.

“I loved having her in class,” Chinoy said of Nagarajan. “She was really interested in the subject. She was really interested in how she could take it back to India and apply it.”

On the technical side, Chinoy teaches his students how to use Microsoft Access and Excel to take a huge amount of raw data – including anything from election campaign donations to boating accidents – and slowly break it into a less intimidating, more manageable form. This helps reporters “get the story out of the numbers,” Nagarajan said.

Equally important, Chinoy said, is learning “how to deal with people to get the information you need to do the stories you want to do.” That is why he also emphasizes the human side of CAR – convincing reluctant government officials to give reporters the public records they are entitled to.

Whether in the United States, India, or anywhere else in the world, government officials who resist giving public information to journalists usually do so out of fear, Chinoy said. They might fear that the reporter won’t know how to interpret the data, or that the data will reveal government inefficiency, negligence or corruption.

“In a funny way, that translates across borders, because humans are humans,” Chinoy said.

by Andy Zieminski, posted August 2007