Open Budgets India: Lessons from the front line

Most of the Indias budget documents arent easily accessible. Those published online are mostly available as unstructured PDFs, making it difficult to search, analyze, and use this crucial data. Gaurav Godhwani discusses the process of creating Open Budgets India and making Indias budgets open, usable, and easy to comprehend.

India follows a federal fiscal architecture that allows for the provision of public goods and services through multiple tiers of government, with each level being assigned to provide a fixed set of goods and services. But public access to government budgets is constrained at present in a number of ways. Access to budget data diminishes significantly as we go deeper from the union (central) government to local governments, particularly at the district and subdistrict levels. This gap has constrained public engagement with locally relevant budget information and processes. In such a scenario, the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA), in collaboration with a number of other organizations and individuals, has developed Open Budgets India, an open budgets data initiative to help make India’s budgets more open, accessible, usable, and easy to comprehend. Gaurav Godhwani discusses the process of creating Open Budgets India and shares lessons learned along the way.