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Journal

Essays, papers and one letter a month.

Field notes for the people doing the work, and the full methods behind them. Free to read, free to reuse.

Essays {{ jCount }}

A girl studying by lantern light with a tablet beside her notebook

Essay 01Benchmarks9 min The last mile is already staffed Every serious attempt to deliver services at scale in a difficult geography reaches the same conclusion: the people are already there. What is missing is not presence but leverage. Read the essay →

Essay 02Benchmarks6 min What the second year costs, and who pays for it Maintenance is the least fundable line item in the sector and the single best predictor of whether a tool survives.

Essay 03Accessibility5 min A syllabus is a pipeline problem Converting a prescribed textbook into a navigable audio edition is an afternoon of compute. Getting it into a classroom takes a term.

Essay 04Field notes7 min Notes from two days in a mobile medical van Gloves on, one charger, six hours without signal. Everything we assumed about the interface was wrong by the second hour.

Essay 05Method4 min Why we ask for the problem, not the solution Most intake forms invite organisations to describe a product. The useful question is narrower.

Essay 06Benchmarks8 min Voice is the only interface that reaches everyone Literacy, language and device assumptions quietly exclude most of the people an advisory service is meant to serve.

Essay 07Policy6 min Procurement is a design constraint, not paperwork A tool that cannot be bought by a district office will never reach a district, however good it is. What the rules actually require, and how a one-time asset transfer removes most of it.

Essay 08Method7 min Most impact metrics measure the programme, not the person Counting trainings delivered tells you what the organisation did. Following a cohort for twelve months tells you whether anything changed, and software has made that affordable.

Essay 09Benchmarks8 min The case for small models in the field A model that runs on the device you already own beats a better model you cannot reach. Benchmarks, tradeoffs, and why per-token cost quietly rations a service.

Calculator · from essay 02

What will the second year cost?

Enter what the build cost and what share you expect to spend each year keeping it alive. Budget for this before you start.

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Three-year total ₹{{ cTotal }} lakh

Upkeep is {{ cShare }} of the three-year spend. A simple estimate from the figures you enter.

Papers

WP-01Healthcare32 pp Offline-first clinical records for mobile health units Architecture, sync semantics and identity resolution without connectivity Request the paper → WP-02Accessibility24 pp Converting a state syllabus into accessible editions A reproducible pipeline for audio, large print and structured text Request the paper → WP-03Agriculture28 pp Voice-first advisory on ordinary phone calls Design, latency budgets and measurement for no-app service delivery Request the paper → WP-04Method20 pp Measuring outcomes a programme can afford to follow Instrumenting cohorts for twelve-month outcomes rather than activity counts Request the paper → WP-05Engineering26 pp Small models on old devices Selection, quantisation and update paths for on-device deployment Request the paper → WP-06Policy18 pp Procuring and owning public-interest software Transfer terms, data residency and the audit conversation Request the paper →

Take any of it. Cite it or don't.

Every method here exists so the next organisation starts where the last one finished. If something is missing, tell us and we will write it.

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