When Data Smelled of Earth and Spoke in Human Voices;My internship at the District Collectorate of Kozhikode.

Some stories arrive as words. Others arrive as numbers in a spreadsheet - quiet, waiting, until you learn how to hear their voices. The first time I walked through the gates of the District Collectorate of Kozhikode, the monsoon air was thick with the scent of wet earth. Rain clung to the mango trees outside, and the corridors echoed with the shuffle of files and the quiet urgency of government work. I thought I was stepping into a world of numbers, forms, and neatly typed reports. I didn’t realize then that I was about to walk straight into the beating heart of communities whose stories would change the way I looked at “data” forever. 

I was assigned to the ABCD data collection project - a mission to ensure that Scheduled Tribe families could receive essential documents without delay. On paper, it sounded like an administrative exercise: design a survey, get it filled, clean the data, send it to the concerned departments. In reality, it became a journey through voices, silences and unspoken pain. 

Our days began with creating the ABCD survey form. The air in the office was heavy with the smell of ink and paper. The air in the office was heavy with the smell of ink and paper, punctuated by the clack of keyboards. We met ST promoters - the bridge between government machinery and tribal Unnathis - sometimes through pixelated online calls, sometimes across worn-out tables in meeting halls. Training them to fill the form wasn’t just about ticking boxes; it was about listening. Their words carried the red soil of distant hamlets, the crackle of fireside conversations, and the weight of histories untold. 

When the forms came back, we moved into the data cleansing phase. It wasn’t glamorous. Hours of staring at spreadsheets, eyes tracing line after line, removing duplicates, fixing typos, tracking down missing details. But behind every correction was a face I could picture : an old man finally getting his ration card, a young mother securing her child’s birth certificate. The stale air of the office mixed with the quiet satisfaction of knowing that every click brought someone closer to dignity. Some moments pierced deeper than others. A promoter’s low, urgent tone as they told me about a boy ensnared in a drug racket. The sharp ache in my chest hearing about nights when public nuisance turned the entire unnathi, sleepless. The quiet heartbreak of learning about school dropout rates that were rising - children abandoning classrooms, not because they lacked ability, but because poverty, family pressures, or the long walks to school weighed heavier than their dreams. In the spreadsheet, they were just another dropout entry but in reality, they represented an untold story, a dream that now sat folded away like an unused notebook. 

Our final task was to prepare detailed reports on each unnathi.

I remember one evening, the room was dim except for the glow of our laptops, the monsoon rain drumming steadily on the tin roof. As I typed, I imagined the lanes of those unnathis - the smell of woodsmoke, the chatter of children, the undercurrent of resilience in every voice. I realized I wasn’t just writing a report but was documenting a plea for change. When the cleaned, categorized data finally went to the concerned departments, there was no grand applause. Just the quiet knowledge that somewhere, in some office, a file would move a little faster. And somewhere else, in a small home tucked away in the hills, a document would arrive that could change a life. 

I left the Collectorate with far more than an internship certificate, I carried gratitude - for the trust placed in me. Accountability - for the voices I had heard. And a lasting understanding that even the smallest cell in a spreadsheet can hold a human heartbeat. Nothing would have been possible without the collective solidarity of the entire team who burnt their midnight oil to pick each data insight as lived experiences to be dealt with utmost compassion & sincerity. I witnessed the magic that happens when human souls stood shoulder to shoulder to turn the so-called ‘impossible affairs’ to the utmost reality. And that’s the thing about numbers - in the right hands, they can become the most powerful stories ever told.