A look into State Budget Analysis — Story Generator
Analysis of State Budgets, in terms of the changing priorities and commitments of the government has always been at the centre stage of debate among researchers, journalists, etc. Given this backdrop, Open Budgets India has built a visualization tool named the Story Generator to facilitate comparison of aggregate budget indicators across different social and economic sectors for different states and years. True to its name, the tool enables its users to generate choropleths and graphs by selecting different combination of states for comparing various budget indicators and engage more with budgets.
Development of Story Generator
The tool has been the result of a collaborative effort of researchers engaged in budget analysis and the technologists responsible for giving it its present shape. The dataset for the tool has been painstakingly prepared by a team of researchers at the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability. A team of volunteers from Bangalore chapter of DataKind have been actively involved in the initial conceptualisation and planning of the tool, later to be taken up by CBGA’s technical team to give it a concrete shape.
Story Generator has been modeled in a way which can be easily extended to incorporate more datasets. The app leverages features of ReactJS ecosystem to handle multi-dimensional data easily. It does not require any separate infrastructure for execution and can be hosted free of cost on platforms like Github. The open source tool has been built with specific focus on being sustainable and easy to use with limited resources.
The Alpha Version
The alpha version of the tool incorporates data from both the expenditure and the receipts side of State Budgets. Data on aggregate budget indicators, like Total Expenditure, Per-Capita Expenditure, etc. from twelve critical social and economic sectors (such as agriculture, health, education, rural development and social welfare, etc.) have been collated from 26 states. The receipts side of the state finances have been represented by parameters like Total Receipts, Own Tax Revenue and Grants in Aid from Centre and a few others. These indicators have been chosen to be reflective of the overall fiscal health of the state and provide the users talking points to frame their analysis.
The data collation method has been time-consuming to take into account several changes in the formats of state budgets over the years, especially the merger of the plan and non-plan expenditure from 2017–18. In order to ensure reliability and accuracy of the datasets, multiple rounds of validation are put in place. A detailed index defining what each sector comprises of has been incorporated both in the tool as well as on OBI.
Generating Visuals with Story Generator
Comparing across states for per capita expenditure on a particular sector (say, Agriculture) is a few clicks away with this tool. The graph below depicts the trend of per capita expenditure incurred on health by the following 4 states, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. The visuals generated by our users can be easily downloaded and re-used in their analysis pieces, blogs and social media platforms.
Response for the tool
Ever since its launch, the tool has been one of the most viewed sections on Open Budgets India. It has, to some extent, initiated our communications with the research community engaged in budget research and their suggestions have been immensely helpful to refine the existing structure. It is in this context that the interactiveness of the platform and the dynamic nature of the visualizations become crucial for reaching out to both the ‘budget educated’ and the ‘budget curious’ groups. Story Generator has already been mentioned in a few data stories by researchers on different platforms. With the integration of 2017–18 data on the tool, we hope to reach out to a wider community researchers, journalists, policy analysts and other civil society organisations engaged in policy debates in India.
Simonti Chakraborty is a programme officer with CBGA.
She can be reached at simonti@cbgaindia.org
Akshay Verma is a visualization expert with CBGA.
He can be reached at akshayverma295@gmail.com
For more information on OBI, please visit www.openbudgetsindia.org
