A social media page “India in Pixels” has recently come into limelight after a post on the statistics on women drinker state wise, which showed Arunachal’s women to be the top among drinkers followed by Sikkim.
In the post, the statistics was- “Among women who drink alcohol, 18 percent drink alcohol almost every day, and 35 percent drink alcohol about once a week.
The percentage of women aged 15-49 who drink alcohol is by far the highest among women in Arunachal Pradesh (26%) and Sikkim (23%).
Drinking is common among women from scheduled tribes (7%) than from any other caste/tribe group.”
Surprisingly, to this almost after 6 months, Union Minister, Kiren Rijiju shared the post and questioned the credibility of the data.
Meanwhile, the social media page “India in Pixels” replied to this stating, “Thank you Kiren Rijiju Sir for deeming my work worthy of your attention. The data is from the National Family Health Survey from 2015-16 and it is likely that the stats would have been updated if a recent study was conducted.
A policy maker like Kiren Sir noticing our work is a validation of the fact that data grounded conversations can be facilitated with easy visualizations. This is a big affirmation to the goal of this page to make official data more accessible in our country without any layer of bias or emotions.
“Personally, I think this stat tells how North Eastern cultures do not view alchohol as a taboo and rather part of life. I am sure someone more experienced than me can interpret the data in a better context. That is the beauty of data – it tells what the world is, not what it should be or what is ought to be.”