One fine sunny Saturday morning, at 9 am, I headed off to work at Satya Special School in Puducherry. Although my routine hadn’t changed, the act of going into work felt different that day. I entered through the same gates with the same security guards, yet the quietness of the school was startling! On Saturdays, it is just the staff that comes in to work; for the children who attend the school, it is a day off.
That Saturday would end up changing how I understood the data I had been working with.
Showing up to work on a Saturday was not an uncommon occurrence for me. Back home, for years, I worked on weekends. Sundays had a lower sense of urgency compared to the weekdays. So I expected the same energy walking into work on Saturday, with no students, the Saturday was bound to be calmer. Yet things felt rushed, and with no students there was a panic in the air to get the work done and head home. Without students, teachers had work to catch up on, training to attend, and assessments of new admits to conduct.
The nature of my work at Satya is such that there isn’t a set team I work with; instead, I interact with many members of the expansive team of Satya to conduct my projects. Just as I needed to interact in a top-down manner where I ask questions of everyone, with each role’s insight bringing more to my project, the school functions similarly. The teachers, center in-charges, helpers, accounts, and so many other departments make up the school. There were so many pieces to the puzzle that it wasn’t till I saw Saturday that I realized how it fit together. It wasn’t a regular workday but a new lens into Satya.
During this new workday, I saw a new part of the office. Teachers and therapists, really, all the staff that I often see in passing at Satya, typically have their hands full during the day with children and are in classrooms or providing therapy. Typically, therapists that I can only wave a hi to because they were providing therapy to a student are available for a conversation. For the first time, I was able to sit with a special education teacher and understand the depth and method behind what they do.
Which brings the question: what was I doing at work on a Saturday?
Saturday is also when new admissions are assessed. A small number of students—typically between four and ten—come in for evaluation. One of my first projects at Satya was to analyze the demographic data of students that Satya has served to better understand the population being served. This task seemed quite obvious at first – take a look at the data, run the numbers, and draw conclusions. However, it was only once I analyzed the data using Tableau that I recognized that I had analyzed a second-hand understanding of the data collection method, which was data collected by special education teachers at the time of admission. I had the numbers, but I had never seen the process behind them. So the Saturday workday became a chance for me to observe said data collection.
When a student is admitted to Satya, they go through a General Assessment form through a system called the Enabling Inclusion App (EI App).
They are asked demographic questions such as where they are from, family status, income levels, etc then based on their responses on what type of disability the child has, assessments with speech therapists, physical therapists, and psychologists are conducted. This process is done by special educators and overseen by the in-charge and/or principal of the school. My focus was on the demographic component.
The importance of this data becomes clearer in context. As per the 2011 Census, 2.2% of the population in India has disabilities. The classifications utilized in 2011 are: seeing, hearing, speech, movement, intellectual disability, mental illness, multiple disabilities, and any other disability (ASTHA, 2:35–2:45).
The value in data comes from looking at the overall number of children with disabilities in Puducherry to understand how many of them have been served. 30,189 people in the UT of Puducherry are reported to have disabilities (as per the latest UDID records), where 1161 are between the ages of 0-15. Of those 30,189 people, 984 are being served by Satya (some over the age of 15), with fluctuations in this number, of course. These numbers help identify the gap between those who need services and those who receive them.
Yet, when I first analyzed the data, something didn’t add up. When I first conducted a demographic analysis, the data did not match what practitioners experienced. For instance, the data said that a large portion of students coming into Satya had both a mother and father present; however, what practitioners experienced was that students had single mothers. This trend makes up a large part of Satya’s work and ideology of how to create better measures to serve children with a single mother. Programs like Community Rehab Assistance (CRA) and others were created so that mothers can work and be involved in care for the child. However, the data states that many fathers are a part of the family and include grandparents and aunts. In order to understand what it actually means, sitting in on an assessment proved to be my answer.
The questions ask how much parents earn, with specification of father or mother, who resides in the household, and who takes care of the child. However, it does not ask if a father is very active in taking care of the child, nor does it ask to describe the exact role they play. This begs the questions: is the father contributing economically for the child, are they caring for the child, do they only live in the household in name but not in actuality, and so many other clarifications?
These nuances are not reflected in the data.
What appears as a two-parent household in numbers may, in practice, function as a single-mother-led home. The significance, therefore, is that questions need to be asked differently to ascertain a full demographic picture of the family. Many single mothers perhaps have a husband contributing to the child economically, but not to the day-to-day care. To truly understand the lived realities of families, the way we collect data must evolve.
Similarly, understanding Satya as an organization requires looking beyond surface-level interactions. It was only through conversations with staff, such as the special education teacher, and observing their work that I began to grasp the full picture.
Working in Puducherry brings new insights each day—but that Saturday offered something more. It didn’t just show me a different workday; it showed me the limits of data without context and the importance of always digging deeper. Each day brings something new to the table working in Puducherry, but Saturday brought the whole platter!
References
ASTHA. “India’s Census: The Evolution of Disability Data and the Journey toward Inclusive Enumeration.” YouTube, 3 Nov. 2025, www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMysvzApocA.
UDID. “Anonymised Data Indicating State-Wise, District-Wise, Disability Type-Wise, Age Group-Wise and Gender-Wise Figures of Disability Certificate/UDID Card Generated through UDID Portal.” Swavlambancard.gov.in, 2026, swavlambancard.gov.in/dashboardchart.
