Akshar
Katariya

A WhatsApp and SMS chatbot that turns a farmer's spoken or typed transactions, in any language, into a clean, bank-ready financial record. Smallholder farmers in India lack formal credit access because they cannot maintain structured books. Banks cannot assess repayability, so farmers fall back on informal moneylenders charging around 25% interest. Khitaab meets farmers where they already are, with no new app or learning curve required.

Hexagonal tile maps are a staple of Western data journalism, but nobody had built one for India. I designed a full set of hex maps for Indian states and built a website around them, making the format accessible for journalists, researchers, and anyone who wants to visualize Indian data differently. A small thing that fills a real gap.

Temperature anomalies are hard to make visceral. This project combines 3D plots, SVG graphics, and audio to make complex climate trends accessible and emotionally legible for diverse audiences, moving beyond static charts into something closer to experience.

Interactive Altair visualizations exposing the global disparity in fluorinated gas emissions by country, development status, and industry. Key findings: the top 10 emitters dominate, per capita trends diverge sharply, and retail refrigeration is a quietly rising culprit. Visual narratives built to inform targeted mitigation policy.

A GIS-based market report on Ashburn, a Chicago neighborhood sitting at the edge of both a grocery desert and a transit gap. The report maps food service accessibility, examines public transit and cycling infrastructure, identifies underserved pockets, and offers concrete recommendations for improving food equity and transportation access.

An interactive, state-by-state dashboard exploring US energy mix trends and each state's stated energy transition goals. Built to let policymakers, journalists, and researchers quickly locate where a state stands and where it says it is headed.

Funded through a pitch contest at Booth School of Business. We designed a 50-question survey completed by 180 Americans to study charitable giving patterns: what drives donations, preferences for formal vs. informal giving, and the anxieties donors carry. Analysis conducted in R using Qualtrics data.

Qualitative and quantitative benchmarking of APA Corp., a hydrocarbon exploration company, against ESG peers. Supervised by John Oxtoby (Ariel Investments) and Neolle Liang (Builders Vision). Identified material ESG themes and used R to conduct comparative financial and non-financial analysis.

Sentiment analysis and Named Entity Recognition on five canonical books about the Partition of India, searching for textual evidence of syncretism, shared cultural memory across the divide. The goal was to move beyond close reading and let the data speak to questions historians have debated for decades.

A bi-weekly data literacy newsletter with 300+ subscribers, built to bring rigorous data storytelling to Indian readers. Published 20+ pieces on sports analytics, sentiment analysis, impact investing, and civic data. Also runs a guest author program mentoring high school students in India on data storytelling.

An SMS-based habit tracker designed for users who do not want another app. Built with Ruby on Rails and D3.js. Users self-report via text message, and the app visualizes progress over time. Designed for simplicity and zero friction.