Divya Natarajan is a Chennai-based data journalist covering the intersection of statistics and public policy. Her work exposes how numbers are used — and misused — in governance and public discourse.
Recent work
The RSF Press Freedom Index Is Not a Measurement. It Is an Opinion Poll.
The RSF World Press Freedom Index ranks 180 countries using a questionnaire of 88 subjective questions answered by hand-picked experts. Not a single question asks for a verifiable number. A formal logic analysis shows the inference chain is unsound. A statistical analysis shows the conversion of Likert-scale opinions into decimal-point rankings manufactures false precision. We propose the IWE Empirical Press Freedom Index: five pillars of publicly available, independently verifiable data including ITU internet penetration, CPJ journalist casualties per capita, Access Now shutdown counts, OONI censorship measurements, and platform transparency reports.