AN INTRODUCTION
A new financial year has started, and with that, a new budget year. The government of India alone is expected to spend nearly ₹53.5 lakh crores – a figure so large that a more manageable number is this: ₹17 lakhs per second.
From where does the government get this money, and how they plan to spend it, is detailed in the yearly budget documents released by the finance ministry. Government of India uploads these documents on their official website indiabudget.gov.in. All state governments upload budget documents to their respective websites. For many years, India didn’t have a single source to find all relevant budget documents, until the launch of Open Budgets India*.
*There’s a reason I’ve not hyperlinked the website.
OPEN BUDGETS INDIA – A DIGITAL PUBLIC GOOD
In 2017, under the stewardship of the Centre for Budget Governance and Accountability (CBGA), OBI launched with budget documents from all the union and all state governments. Over the next few years, the platform grew, with more documents archived, and more features added to make it a one-stop destination for anyone interested to access the documents, or know more about budgets. By 2024, the platform hosted nearly 25,000 budget documents spanning more than a decade.
The reason I’ve not hyperlinked to the website is because the platform is dead. For reasons that I cannot go into in this blog, CBGA ceased operations, and within months, the domain expired and subjected to domain sniping, and re-directed to an unrelated website. With this, a resource that has been consistently serving nearly 100,000 users annually, went dark. If you want to see archived pages of the platform, head to the Wayback Machine.
BUILDING INDIABUDGETS.ORG
I was a public finance researcher and project manager at CivicDataLab, leading the technical development of OBI. For four years, I put my heart and soul into help build the 2nd phase of Open Budgets India. It breaks my heart to witness its fate. Over the last few months, I have been wondering how to resurrect the mission of OBI. I am neither a developer nor a designer. Building another OBI is not trivial.
However, the most powerful AI models make it easier than ever to dream big. Perhaps one of the most important impacts of these artificial intelligence tools is that it makes such public good projects easier to dream and execute. Last month, I did just that.
I bought a domain, ideated and prompted Claude Code, and is now actively building indiabudgets.org as a “weekends and nights” project. For now, a ‘Coming Soon’ page is live. If you’ve read this far, may I request you to visit the page, and sign up for an update when the site goes live later this year.
To be continued next week.
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