Outline India is rewriting impact through grassroots data collection

When Prerna Mukharya founded Outline India in 2012, she wasn’t trying to build yet another research consultancy. She wanted to go deeper than what larger research or consulting firms were doing, and decided to look into the why of it all; “we asked, ‘why do we exist? ’,” and the answer, she says, has remained the same to this day, “to restore context to the idea of impact.”

India is changing at a fast pace.

And yet, some of the development challenges are very, very rudimentary,” says Mukharya.

One of those challenges is foundational learning. “FLN—foundational literacy and numeracy—explores if a child going to school can read basic text. Numbers say they can’t. That’s a reality at scale,” she adds.

Outline India’s philosophy rests on the belief that numbers alone cannot tell the full story. “Mixed-method, participatory research and getting the story behind the numbers is important when you’re doing discussions with people or women or self-help groups or farming communities or young girls and pregnant mothers,” she says.

Her researchers map villages on foot, often learning as much from a conversation at the tea stall as from a formal survey. “You go to the field, you go to a village centre or a district centre, you find the sarpanch or people just chatting, you strike up a conversation and you’d be surprised at the issues that come to the fore — the ones that matter to the community.”

For Mukharya, the process of listening is as vital as the data itself. “We use hand-drawn maps. We see, for instance, that people from the oppressed castes live on one side of the river. When we go in and try to create a map of the village, and talk to someone on that side. The dominant community will live in another part of the village, and the water point or the hand pump will also be located closer to them. That’s the reality in India.”

At the policy level, Outline India’s work has often meant translating complex realities into clarity. In one sanitation programme, Mukharya and her team visited dozens of government schools, inspecting toilets and hygiene infrastructure. “A couple of years ago, we did this for UNICEF and another partner called WaterAid. They had a lot of data. The government had set targets for states. Some states had not met their target, some were just about meeting it, and some went well beyond. We were asked to look at this body of data and build a one-page report card per state. But they had so much going on!”

That report card became a bridge between bureaucrats and data collectors—a tool that distilled large amounts of information into something immediately useful. “That would help the babu understand what was going well, how they were sitting in terms of meeting goals, and what models had worked locally,” she says.

As India’s policy and development ecosystem evolves, so does the technology surrounding data. For Mukharya, artificial intelligence is less a threat and more an accelerant for inclusion. “A great example of AI’s potential for social good lies in healthcare. India still has one of the highest tuberculosis burdens globally. With AI, it’s now possible to predict the probability of a person having or recovering from TB simply through access to X-ray images, something that wasn’t possible a few years ago. This doesn’t just strengthen medical diagnosis; it also empowers informal healthcare providers who are trusted in their local communities. Of course, there’s a risk of misuse, but the overall effect on community health outcomes is positive and transformational,” she says.

Similarly, in education, adaptive learning powered by AI has opened up new possibilities for gamified learning. Children in government and low-income schools can now access tailor-made assessments and learning modules designed around their abilities and pace, making foundational learning engaging and data-driven, notes Mukharya.

AI is also changing how Outline India works. “Even for us at Outline India, AI has had a very tangible effect. A one-hour qualitative interview that once took four hours to transcribe can now be processed in minutes with about 90% accuracy in English and around 60–65% in Hindi. This saves time, money, and human bandwidth, letting our team focus more on analysis and insight generation rather than manual processes,” she says.

Over the past decade, Outline India has worked across 26 states and more than 15,000 villages, reaching over five million people. It has designed surveys, audits and evaluations for development agencies, CSR programmes and governments—covering education, sanitation, gender equity, and climate adaptation. Mukharya’s mantra of “accountability, authenticity and incentives” has helped the organisation gain a positive reputation.

As she looks ahead, Mukharya says the future of data lies not in dashboards but in dialogue—evidence as a living conversation between citizen and state. “So many of India’s problems are complex but solvable if we begin with people and context,” she says, “measuring meaning by ensuring that those being counted are finally heard.”