Documentary photographer turned data scientist for the public good. I work at the intersection of cities and civics, data and democracy – building open source tools based on public data for people who don’t live within spreadsheets: reporters, researchers, civic groups, policy nerds, curious citizens.

• blr-traffic-monitor
  Reproducible notebooks and scrapers to track congestion on fixed routes in Bengaluru – useful for city reporters, mobility researchers, and advocacy campaigns.

• namma-metro-ridership-tracker
  A maintained ridership dataset and analysis of Bengaluru’s metro, ready for data stories, transport policy memos, and visual explainers.

• india-votes-data
  Clean, analysis‑ready election datasets from official sources, designed for newsroom graphics desks, political scientists, and civic tech projects.

• aditya-L1-solar-explorer
  Notebooks for working with Aditya‑L1 solar mission data, giving research labs and science journalists a starting point for solar‑weather stories and demos.

• c2pa-viewer
  A browser‑based C2PA and metadata inspector that helps journalists and fact‑checkers verify image provenance without touching the command line.

• ngl-storyteller
  A small narrative playground for turning real‑world material into interactive stories and prototypes.

• jamboree-converter
  Turn Jupyter notebooks into clean PDFs for briefings, decks, or classroom handouts with one step.

• gst-invoice-for-freelancers
  A practical GST invoicing tool for independent workers in India, built from a freelancer’s perspective.

• infinity-scrool
  A robust JustDial scraper for building local business datasets, market maps, or sampling frames for field research.

• ppt-scanner
  Quickly skim hundreds of PPT files using the OpenAI API, so researchers and editors can find the one slide they care about without opening every deck.

• bankable
  Experimental tooling to convert messy financial PDFs into structured markdown that analysts and investigative reporters can actually work with.

• flatwrite
  A distraction‑free markdown editor built on ultra‑lightweight UI frameworks – ideal for writing briefs, methods notes, or story drafts.

If you're a civic tech startup, a research lab, data-driven newsroom, an advocacy group, or have a role involving code and creativity that defies definition, I can help:

• Design and maintain public data pipelines around cities, elections and civic infrastructure.

• Build focused tools or dashboards for newsrooms, labs or advocacy groups.

• Collaborate on data-driven stories — from that messy first scrape to publication-ready visuals.

Write to me at ms@thecontrarian.in. Let's change the world!