India in Charts

About

India in Chartsis an open-source data journalism project that visualizes India's economic story through interactive charts built from official Reserve Bank of India data.

The RBI publishes an extraordinary wealth of statistical data - payment systems, bank credit, foreign exchange reserves, household savings, inflation surveys, corporate performance, and more. Most of it sits in Excel files and PDF tables that few people ever see. This project turns that data into visual stories that anyone can explore.

The Data

Every chart on this site is built from data published by the RBI on rbi.org.in. Data sources include:

  • Payment System Indicators - monthly data from 57 PSI pages + 62 RBI Bulletin Table 43 pages, covering Dec 2015 to present
  • Bank-wise ATM/Card Statistics - 180 monthly HTML pages with per-bank data, covering Apr 2011 to present
  • Household Financial Savings - RBI Bulletin Table 50(a)/52(a), quarterly data for 6 fiscal years
  • Foreign Exchange Reserves - Handbook Tables 147 & 214, 58 years of annual + 2 years of weekly data
  • Sectoral Credit Deployment - Handbook Tables 45 & 167, annual and monthly sectoral breakdowns
  • Inflation Expectations Survey - 70 bi-monthly survey rounds since Sep 2008
  • Balance of Payments - Handbook Table 194 + press releases, 19 quarters of FDI vs portfolio flows

Methodology

Data is fetched directly from RBI's website using automated scrapers. HTML pages on www.rbi.org.in are parsed with BeautifulSoup, while file downloads from rbidocs.rbi.org.in use Playwright for browser automation. All parsed data is exported as JSON and rendered with Apache ECharts.

The RBI has changed data formats multiple times over the years - unit changes (Million to Lakh), category restructurings (UPI added in 2020), column layout changes across 4 different ATM/Card formats, and more. Each parser handles these transitions explicitly, verified by reading actual file headers rather than assuming consistency.

Every number in every insight is verified against the parsed data. Titles and narratives are derived from what the data shows, not pre-decided.

Built By

India in Charts is built by Ankush Dixit - a product builder and self-taught developer. The entire project - data pipeline, parsers, frontend, and visualizations - was built with the assistance of Claude Code.

Open Source

The complete source code - data pipeline, parsers, frontend, and all raw data - is available on GitHub. Contributions, corrections, and suggestions are welcome.

Disclaimer

This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Reserve Bank of India in any way. All data is sourced from publicly available releases on rbi.org.in. The visualizations and commentary represent the author's interpretation and do not constitute financial advice.