IndiaSpend Is Now ISignal, India’s Data Desk
The team hasn’t changed, nor have the standards or the commitment to verification. What changes is the name.
Dear Reader
It was 2011. The national conversation was centred around accountability, but apart from some numbers that were routinely quoted, the narrative—for the large part—remained abstract, sans the information and context that can help provide the basis for action.
That is when IndiaSpend was born, with a clear and simple aim: using data to tell stories about India. Fifteen years later, we are one of the most widely cited publications in India and abroad.
We counted things that weren’t being counted. We put numbers where there were only opinions. And for 15 years, that work—slow, rigorous, often thankless—quietly shaped how India’s best journalists, policymakers, and citizens understood the country they lived in. We are proud of every word of it.
We’ve held power to account irrespective of dispensations, focusing on the foundational issues of the country—healthcare, education, gender, the environment and climate change, and livelihoods. We continue to believe when these basics are addressed effectively and consistently, India will have a baseline of opportunity and growth for every citizen.
Fifteen years later, the landscape is changing faster than ever. The internet is noisier than it has ever been, information moves faster, spreads wider, and gets harder to trust with every passing year. People are beginning to get their information from AI models prone to error, hallucination and sycophancy. All of this makes our job more important than ever.
In that environment, a name that said “we count India’s spending” started to feel like a description of a tool instead of a statement of purpose. We were doing so much more than counting. And the people who needed us most—younger, more online, navigating an information landscape we couldn’t have imagined when we launched—didn’t always know we existed.
We needed a name that announced what we stand for before anyone clicked a single link.
Why ISignal
We are now ISignal, because when you strip away the noise, all that survives is a precise, purposeful signal. It is the facts that dispel the rumours, and the data that inform the discourse.
We have spent 15 years doing that. The team hasn’t changed, nor have the standards or the commitment to verification.
What changes is the name. And with it, the scope of what we’re building.
ISignal is IndiaSpend with a broader mandate. We are investing in AI-powered tools that help readers navigate information in real time. We are building products for a generation that consumes news on their phones, in thirty-second bursts, between other things—and still deserves to be told the truth with clarity.
What doesn’t change
Our mission remains the same. As a small newsroom, we are not the first on the scene, nor are we the loudest voice. We are the most reliable. Everything that made IndiaSpend worth reading is still here.
We work with the same journalists who spend months reporting, writing and fact-checking to bring India’s stories to your screens. Our editors will continue to hold the standards, ever more important in these times. We bring to you facts, presented clearly and without agenda.
If anything, that matters more now than it did in 2011.
ISignal exists to cut through.
A note to our readers
If you have been with us since the beginning, thank you. You have been part of something genuinely unusual—a newsroom that believed rigour was a competitive advantage, and that the truth, told carefully, could find an audience.
If you are new here: welcome. You picked a good moment to arrive.
ISignal. India’s signal.
— The ISignal team, formerly IndiaSpend