Unpacking State Budget Trends through the Sector Dashboard on Open Budgets India
This article is written by independent public finance researcher and consultant with CivicDataLab — Simonti Chakraborty.
Why is it difficult to engage with government budgets at the sub-national levels?
Government budgets in India have historically been characterized as being complicated with heavily coded documents. This has limited any meaningful engagement with and discourse on budgets by a wider base of citizens. Furthermore, accessibility to comprehensive and simple to understand budget data becomes increasingly a challenge as we move down from the central level to the States and then further below to the local levels of government. To add to this, improvements made in the availability and quality of fiscal data in the country over the last decade have remained uneven across different states. As a result, while a lot is discussed and dissected on the Union Budget, citizen’s engagement is far less when it comes to analysing state budgets and making comparisons across them.
States are critical focal points for implementing a majority of the flagship government schemes and programmes, across sectors in the country and the onus of spending on development outcomes increasingly lies with them. However, there are very few platforms which allow users to comprehensively analyse insights from different state budgets under one roof and scrutinize them sector-wise in an easy to comprehend manner. To address this gap, CivicDataLab, in collaboration with their technical partner, the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA) has developed the Sector Dashboard on State Budgets, as an important component of the open data platform, Open Budgets India (OBI).
What does the Sector Dashboard provide?
The dashboard makes available sector-wise curated data for 11 social and economic sectors like education, health, rural development, agriculture etc. for all states as well as a set of Aggregate Budget and Receipts Indicators. Each sector has a group of 5 common indicators such as ‘Per-capita Expenditure, ‘Total Sector Expenditure’, ‘Total Sector Expenditure as a % of State Budget’, ‘Revenue Expenditure as a % of Total Sector Expenditure’ and ‘Capital Expenditure as a % of Total Sector Expenditure’ which can be filtered as per the user’s requirements. Data is available for seven financial years from 2017–18 to 2023–24. It enables users to make interstate comparison of budget data by generating simple and interactive visualisations, by choosing from a set of different types of presentations like the map or choropleth view, the table form and the bar diagram option, which can be downloaded for reuse. Detailed descriptions are included to help users understand the specificities of calculation for the indicators presented. In addition to the dashboard, the complete database for all the sectors is openly available for the users on OBI.
What is the significance of developing the Sector Dashboard?
In addition to being ponderously coded and jargonized, budget documents of different states are often arranged and presented differently. Hence, it takes a mammoth effort to create a standardised database of fiscal indicators for any meaningful comparison across states. It entails collating data from multiple sources for multiple states, and thereafter making sense of the varied formats of the available budget data. Further, sector-wise curated budget information is not readily available. Spending on a sector is typically spread across multiple departments and requires manual effort and sectoral understanding scanning through the detailed budget books of all such departments and identify the relevant budget heads. For example, spending on health, as a sector, is incurred by not only the Health Department of a state, but by several other departments like Medical Education, Training and Research, Urban Development & Public Works, Home, Social Justice and Empowerment, Tribal Development, Labour and Skill Development, etc. to name a few. The Sector Dashboard on OBI addresses both these issues by making available sector-wise data on budget allocations and spending, as well as making such data comparable across states and financial years.
How can the dashboard be used?
The dashboard has a wealth of information, carefully assembled from state budgets, which can be used by researchers, policy analysts, journalists, and budget enthusiasts alike. Users can explore the functionalities of the dashboard by leveraging the interactive interface where they can switch between the indicators, budget attributes (e.g., Budget Estimates, Revised Estimates and Actuals) and financial years.
Comparing, say, the per-capita health expenditure for the north-eastern states become easy with the dashboard where it comes out clearly that in 2020–21, Sikkim has the highest per-capita spending on health among all north-eastern states, followed by Arunachal Pradesh (the graph below showing the comparison is generated from the dashboard). One can also use the data tables from the dashboard to generate further insights and weave their own stories. The detailed concordance tables provided alongside the data, highlight the definitions used in creating the sectoral boundaries and at the same time enables researchers to modify and add to those definitions, creating opportunities for collaborative learning.
The sector-wise arranged data on the Dashboard helps in directing the spotlight on the government’s budgetary commitments for key development sectors. It can also serve as a useful tool for the policy makers to understand their relative fiscal position, among other states. The ongoing budget discussions of FY 2024–25 can effectively be informed by unpacking nuanced insights from the dashboard and in turn make budgets more accessible and engaging for many.
