Every number here traces to a source.
HEF publishes 35 sourced records across projects, trackers, briefs and whitepapers. Every one of them carries a named source, a date, and a stated confidence tier. This page explains what those mean, so you can judge the weight of any figure on this site rather than taking it on trust.
Confidence tiers
Not everything we publish is known to the same standard. Rather than flatten that into a single confident voice, each figure is labelled with the tier it actually earns.
- Verified
- Traced to a primary source and checked by HEF against the original document.
- Reported
- Published by a named third-party source and not independently confirmed by HEF.
- Estimate
- Modeled or derived by HEF from published inputs. Not an observed value.
A tier is never applied in bulk. Moving a record to Verified requires someone at HEF to read the primary document and attach their name to it.
How data is collected and verified
The steps below are the ones the codebase enforces. Where a step depends on a working practice that has not yet been written down, it says so rather than describing a process that does not exist.
- 1Source selection. Primary documents first — government releases, multilateral lender disclosures, regulator filings — then named institutional research, then regional press. The preferred order is set out on the source policy.
- 2Recording. Every figure is entered with the source’s name, the date the data describes, and — where held — a link to the original document and its publication date. Of the 83 sources cited across the site, 0 currently carry both a link and a publication date; the rest are named only and are listed for completion in the build log. A record missing a source cannot be built.
- 3Derivation. A tracker figure is never read straight off a source. The aggregation or model is written out on the tracker page and carried into its structured data as the measurement technique.
- 4Verification. A record is tiered (below) and stamped with the desk that confirmed it and the date. Moving to Verified requires the primary document to have been read.
- 5Review and correction. Each tracker states a review cadence and a window (below) after which the site stops calling it live. Corrections are recorded, not overwritten.
Tracker review windows
Each tracker carries its own window, set from its stated review cadence. When the last verification is older than the window, every surface that shows the figure switches from “live” to “last updated” with the date made prominent. The figure itself does not change — only how honestly it is labelled.
- Regional Power Demand (AI-Driven)
- Reviewed monthly; republished when underlying source data changes.
- 60-day window
- Himalayan Connectivity Investment Gap
- Reviewed quarterly, aligned to national budget cycles; republished when underlying source data changes.
- 120-day window
- Himalayan Hydropower Utilization
- Reviewed quarterly; republished when underlying source data changes.
- 120-day window
What every record carries
- Named sources. The publication or institution the figure came from, linked to the original document wherever we hold the link.
- Data as of. The date the underlying data describes — not the date we happened to publish it.
- Last verified, and by whom. When a person last confirmed the record still reflects its sources. Records not re-checked within 120 days are flagged Refresh pending on the page itself; trackers use their own, tighter windows (above).
- Methodology, for anything modeled. An estimate cannot be published without an explanation of how it was derived.
These are not editorial conventions — they are enforced in the codebase. A record missing any of them fails the build and cannot be deployed. Where a figure is unavailable, the element is omitted rather than filled with a placeholder.
Projections versus observations
Tracker charts distinguish measured history from modeled forecast: observed values are drawn as a solid line, projections as a dashed one. Headline figures always quote the last observed value — a forecast never becomes the number at the top of the page. Data exports carry the same distinction in an explicit column.
Corrections
If you believe something here is wrong, we want to know. Being correctable is not a weakness in a research platform — it is the part that makes the rest credible.
Tell us which page, which figure, and what the correct value should be, with a source if you have one. Substantive corrections are made against the record, with the verification date updated so the change is visible.
Scope and limits
The project directory is a record of publicly reported infrastructure, compiled from government releases, multilateral lender disclosures, and regional press. It is not field research: HEF has not independently inspected these projects, and entries reflect what the cited sources report. Tracker values are aggregations and models built on those same public inputs, with their derivation stated on each tracker page.