Himachal Pradesh Fiscal Data Explorer — Introductory Blog
Story till now…
CivicDataLab in collaboration with Center for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA) during the last 2 years has engaged with the question on the flow of money in the fiscal data ecosystem across different tiers of Government such as Union, State, districts, etc. This resulted in developing analytical dashboards like the Union Budget Explorer and the Assam Budget Board. However, to understand the fiscal flow of a state one should not stop at state level but also analyse district wise spending and receipts data. This helps to understand how each district is raising their revenues and spending the allocated funds. By exploring the district wise fiscal data, one can answer some parts of queries such as “how much was spent on primary school building every week in the selected districts or across the state”. The other parts bypass the treasuries and go straight to the implementing societies at the district level. From our analytics about 85% of the funds seem to flow through this meaning around 13–15% flow through our sources (like societies and the pfms).We created a prototype tool to explore spending patterns in two districts of Balasore in Odisha and Krishna in Andhra Pradesh. These tools presented open budget data in a comprehensive and easy to understand form using various interactive visualisations. This can be easily curated using open data on district treasuries that gets updated on a daily basis on Governmental IFMIS — Integrated Financial Management Information System for select states (Himkosh).
Analysing this data has the potential to build stronger research as well as advocacy routes for the civil society organisations in their interactions with the concerned government authorities. Simplifying such complicated fiscal information at the sub-state level can potentially not only increase transparency but also bring about more public awareness and participation in budgetary process
Therefore in collaboration with Tech4Dev and CBGA we have developed the Himachal Pradesh Fiscal Data Explorer .
Why was Himachal Pradesh selected as our first target state?
Himachal Pradesh finance department uploads district treasury data on a daily basis which makes data available at the Drawing And Disbursing Officer (DDO) level daily. Of all the state spending data we have observed, Himachal Pradesh had the most dis-aggregated data and therefore we thought we would start with it
Why do we need a fiscal data explorer?
What is Fiscal Data Explorer?
Fiscal Data Explorer is a unique tool where citizens can explore both budgets and spending data of Himachal Pradesh in an easy to comprehend and simple to use manner.
Sections in the tool:
Now lets see how we can explore some insights using the different sections of the tool:
Expenditure Summary
This section provides an overview of the expenditure incurred under the different budget heads for the Government of Himachal Pradesh across various fiscal years.
District-Wise Expenditure
This section provides an aggregate account of all expenditure incurred by the Government of Himachal Pradesh across different years, districts, district treasuries and by different Drawing and Disbursing Officers(DDOs).
Similarly, one can explore following sections:
Receipts:
- State wise Receipts: This section provides a detailed account of all revenue accrued to the Government of Himachal Pradesh under different heads of accounts.
- District-Wise Receipts: This section provides an aggregate account of all receipts accrued to the Government of Himachal Pradesh as well as detailed accounts of revenue across time, districts, treasuries and DDOs.
Schemes: This section provides detailed accounts of expenditure on select centrally sponsored schemes and state schemes.
COVID-19
In the light of the pandemic, when it is difficult for us to keep track of government spending since there is no code to indicate COVID-19 spending. We looked at press releases, govt orders and the disaster management authority to get details on govt spending. This section is in alpha version, we are planning to add more visualisations to make it more comprehensive. It will also help to advocate with Government departments and bring more transparency which is much required at this time.
Additional features:
Some of the additional features of this tool are:
- Glossary to understand all the budgetary data related jargons used across this tool.
- Every section has “more info” text where one can explore what that section is all about.
- The filters have search functionality and help text to filter the departments and heads of interest
- We also have a basic wiki in place where you can read more about our methodology used to develop the tool
- The tables in all the sections are searchable, sortable and downloadable in machine readable format
How did we curate data?
One of the sections of Himkosh-IFMIS , eKosh disseminates fiscal information related to different stakeholders such as the Finance Department, HODs, DDOs, employees, AG, Pensioners etc. on a daily basis.
eKosh has data on district-wise spending and receipts given in different formats and abstraction levels, to get the relevant data for our tool we followed following steps:
- Thorough research on all the data-set available in eKosh
- Curating the ones which have the maximum amount of information available for district-wise spending and receipts data, this included parsing data from HTML format to machine readable format.
- Collection of all the metadata present across ekosh for example descriptions of various head of accounts through which fiscal data flows, to map it with district-wise spending and receipts data, this helped us make the data much more consumable and self explanatory.
- We wrote scripts to clean the collected data and bring it to format which is easy to understand and store.
- After manipulating the data we validated the prepared data in both manual and automated manner
- Validation was followed by storing the data in flat table formats which are easy to query
- As the data on eKosh gets updated on daily basis, we used different open-source libraries and tools to automate the process of data curation, cleaning and storing without any manual interaction
- To serve the data to the interactive visualisations, we have developed open APIs to fetch data from tables in the format that is required by the visualisations.
To ensure the integrity of the data displayed using visualisations we followed following methodology:
- We conducted spot checks of the data in all the different sections across the years for different DDO’s (at least two DDOs in each district) to check if the data was consistent between the website and the explorer.
To read more about it please visit here
While designing the tool, we kept in mind our target users and we grouped them into:
(a) Budget Educated Group: People working regularly with budgetary data like state finance department(s), budget researchers, economists, academicians, policy makers and more.
(b) Budget Curious Group: People keen to explore budgetary data but may need some help navigating through it, like civil society organisations, MSMEs, media and more.
Road Ahead..
Going ahead we will be adding following sections in the tool:
1) Dynamic Dashboard: The dashboard will be dynamic. The visualisations will be updated on a fortnightly basis with recent data without any manual interaction.
2) Sector specific pages : Comprehensive sector specific pages which will give detailed information on how the sector is performing in terms of revenue raised and spending the allocated funds across districts and years.
3) COVID-19 Spending Tracker: A tracker to analyse how Himachal Pradesh government is performing in terms of funds utilisation in the times of pandemic, this will help us in advocacy efforts and also government to take more informed decisions.
4) Procurement Tracker: A tracker to track all the Health and COVID-19 related tenders released by the Government.
5) Start Discourse channel to have active discussions with the community
6) The dashboard can be used as a potential tool to showcase the possibilities of having access to granular and easy to comprehend fiscal information. At the same time, this can be used as an advocacy mechanism to pursue state governments in opening up their budgets and spending information.
Resources:
Blogs
- Tracking Flow of Public Funds through Open Data
- Roadmap for co-creating the Fiscal Data Explorer
- Selecting schemes and sectors for Himachal Fiscal Data Explorer: Process and Criteria
About the Author
Shreya Agrawal is a data fanatic who loves to scrutinize data as well as answering unanswered questions using visualizations. She will be leading the efforts of co-creating Fiscal Data Explorer and Child Budget Tracker. When she is not busy wrestling with data, she enjoys good movies, food, travel, guitar and Cross Fit.
