Take it, use it, just say where it came from.
Everything original on This Indian Life — the writing, the explainers, and the charts — is shared under a permissive Creative Commons license. The numbers underneath belong to the organisations that collected them, and those keep their own terms.
The site's own work — CC BY 4.0
All original text, explainers, and data visualisations created for This Indian Life are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. In plain terms, you are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute it in any medium or format.
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build on it for any purpose, including commercially.
The one condition is attribution: give appropriate credit to "This Indian Life", link back to the page or to thisindianlife.today, and indicate if you made changes. You don't need to ask permission first.
A simple credit line works well: "Chart/text from This Indian Life (thisindianlife.today), CC BY 4.0."
The data underneath is separate
This is the important part. The CC BY 4.0 license above covers our work — the words we wrote and the charts we drew. It does not relicense the underlying datasets. Those belong to the institutions that produced them, and each one carries its own license and terms of use. We can't sign those rights away on their behalf, and neither can you.
So if you want to reuse the raw numbers themselves — as opposed to our explanation of them — check the terms of the original source. Every article lists its sources, and the main providers in this build are:
- World Bank Indicators API — World Bank
- IndiaDataHub Economic Monitor — IndiaDataHub
- Our World in Data Grapher — Our World in Data
- WHO Global Health Observatory — World Health Organization
- Telecom Regulatory Authority of India — TRAI
- Ember Energy Data — Ember
- EIA International Energy Data — U.S. Energy Information Administration
- Petroleum Planning & Analysis Cell — Government of India
- TradeStat / DGCI&S — Government of India, Department of Commerce
- UN Comtrade — United Nations Statistics Division
- World Air Quality Index — WAQI
- Open-Meteo Historical Weather API — Open-Meteo
- UN Population Data Portal — United Nations Population Division
Most of these (World Bank, Our World in Data, WHO, UN) are themselves open under permissive terms, but the specifics vary, so the source link is always the final word.
Short version: our writing and charts are yours under CC BY 4.0 with a credit. The data behind them stays under whoever collected it — follow the source link to be sure.
How edits are tracked
Because numbers get revised and explainers get rewritten, every article carries an edit log at the foot of the page, and a link to the full version history on GitHub, where you can see the exact changes line by line. Nothing is silently rewritten.