100 Homes

About One Hundred Homes

With increasing interest in economic inequality around the world and, especially, in this long period of economic growth in India, there is always a risk of losing sight of what ordinary peoples’ lives are like that underpin the abstractions of “inequality” and “poverty”. Since actual policy is often guided by such abstractions, the purpose of this project is to tether the very concretely-defined statistics to the way the lived lives underlying them actually look. The hope is that people will come to approach public discussions of income inequality and poverty with a grounded sense of the reality behind the numbers. And perhaps more skepticism.

One Hundred Homes illustrates with pictures, videos, 360 images, and family descriptions what people inside the statistics of income or consumption interviewed for standard government surveys look like in real life. It organizes the one hundred visual essays according to the results of a household consumption survey used throughout India, and the world for that matter, that are used by researchers, statisticians and policy makers to bring out the richness of life under the numbers. One Hundred Homes is the result of a collaboration between journalists, economists, sociologists, photograpers, videographers, survey researchers and others as follows:

  • Videographer: Milann Abraham
  • Photographer: Andrew Ash
  • Narrator: Avantee Aneeta
  • Field Translator: Pooja Bohra
  • Videographer: Alice Cafrae
  • Sociologist: Ravella Beena Chowdary
  • Initial Development: Carolyn Edelstein
  • Website Producer: Heather Grieve
  • Produced By: Jeffrey Hammer
  • Statistician: Brijlal Joshi
  • Survey Researcher: Jitendra Kumar
  • Sociologist: Amrita Lamba
  • Editor: Mannika Mishra
  • Sociologist: Nithya Nagarathinam
  • Sociologist: Sanjana Patro
  • Field Translator: Dinesh Pandey
  • Survey Researcher: Mangla Prasad
  • Sociologist: Jith J R
  • Sociologist: Dibakar Das Roy
  • Field Translator: Chameli Roy
  • Developer: Jen Saxena
  • Sociologist: Katyayni Seth
  • Journalist: Shreya Shah
  • Sociologist: Sarayu Srinivasan
  • Sociologist: Lovey Pant
  • Sociologist: Nikhil Srivastav
  • Project Development: Rachel Steinberg
  • Lead Developer: Dan Sundy
  • Journalist: Divya Trivedi
  • Field Translator: Jyoti Tripathi
  • Field Translator: Manisha Vyas
  • Survey Researcher: Premlata Verma
  • Animator: Justin Wotherspoon
  • Directed By: Evan Wexler
  • Supporting Logistics: Zara Wexler
  • Editor: Adam Wiseman
  • Designer: Alex Wittholtz
  • Sociologist: Chaitra Yadavar
  • Field Producer/Photographer: Rajan Zaveri

Notes on Methodology

Large scale surveys tell us precisely what the overall distribution of income (or consumption) is. The project matches individual homes to their rightful “slots” in the income distribution to show what people at different levels of income look like. We did not do any research of our own to determine what the distribution of consumption is in India. We took this information from standard sources.

The survey that was used to define that distribution was the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) of 2012 administered by the National Council of Applied Economic Research in Delhi. The questionnaire used in that survey is exactly the same as the one used by the National Sample Survey (NSS) done by the government every year or two. The IHDS survey consists of over 42000 households nationwide. This is about the same number as the NSS “thin” round (every five years they do a larger “thick” round of about 120,000). The surveys give virtually identical results. The One Hundred Homes project took this distribution as given – one hundred is a tiny number in comparison. There was no attempt to independently estimate the distribution or to do any statistical inference from the data at all.

Since one hundred is such a small number, we formed a histogram using one hundred boxes to fit inside the “true” distribution from the larger surveys. Each of these boxes told us how many people we needed to find at each level of income. The intervals – the width of the histogram – were chosen to show the overall shape reasonably accurately.

How did we find the homes? Being too difficult to find one hundred individual households across the country, we decided to use twenty places and choose five homes from each. The twenty places were roughly in proportion to the Indian population. There are six urban and fourteen rural locations. One billion two hundred thousand divided by twenty is sixty million. Based on the census, anyplace that had anything like sixty million people was assigned one location (rural Maharashtra and rural West Bengal were the closest matches). With some leeway (all of the rural south warranted three locations among four states; we slightly shortchanged some places like rural Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to accommodate some smaller but important areas like Delhi, Mumbai, the Northeast (always overlooked) and Himachal Pradesh (this is a VISUAL survey so the artists among us insisted) even though they do not each have 60 million residents).


This project was made possible by funding from

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation