About
Anupam Kumar
I am a Program Associate on the Strategic Public Finance team at the Centre for Effective Governance of Indian States (CEGIS), where I work with state governments on how public money is raised, allocated and spent. Before joining CEGIS full time I interned with Absolute Reports, CHRIST Consulting and CEGIS itself — research, project management and a stretch in the education sector, which is where a good deal of what I write here comes from.
I hold an MSc in Economics and Analytics from CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Pune–Lavasa, and an MBA from Quantic School of Business and Technology, Washington, D.C., which I attended on a full scholarship. My first degree is a BCom Honours from CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bangalore, where I held consecutive scholarships for leadership.
What holds my attention is the point where data-driven methods meet the social sector — not the technology for its own sake, but the narrower question of whether better measurement changes what a government actually does. Away from work I read, write, and am always glad of a good argument about any of the above.
I am on LinkedIn, and you can write to me at hello@anupamkumar.org.
What this site is for
Its purpose is narrow and deliberate: to make economic information usable by people who are not economists. Public finance in India is not short of numbers. It is short of numbers anyone can find, check and reuse.
So the site holds three things, in the order they matter. Writing, which is the point. Cleaned datasets, each carrying its source, the date it was retrieved, a description of every column with its unit, and a script that rebuilds it from the original files. And small tools that run entirely in your browser.
On the data
Anyone can post a spreadsheet. What makes a dataset worth citing is that it answers the four questions a careful reader always has: where exactly did this come from, what vintage is it, what are the units, and what was changed?
Every dataset here answers all four. The original files are kept untouched alongside the cleaned ones, and the cleaning can be re-run from scratch by anyone who wants to check it.
One thing in particular gets stated rather than assumed: Budget Estimates, Revised Estimates and Actuals for the same year are three different facts, not one figure corrected twice. Conflating them is the most common error in Indian fiscal datasets, and it quietly corrupts every comparison built on top.
On the tools
Everything computes in your browser. If you open a state finance spreadsheet in a tool here, that file never leaves your laptop, because there is no server for it to go to. For anyone in government, a think tank or a newsroom handling figures that are not yet public, that is not a technical detail.
On how this site is built
It is built to outlive its hosting. Everything of value — every essay, every dataset, every script — is a plain text file in a public repository, readable in any text editor, with no database and no service required to make sense of it.
The hosting is assumed to be temporary and the domain is assumed to be permanent. If this site has to be rebuilt somewhere else in 2035, that is a clone and a build, not a recovery project.
Nothing here tracks you. There is no analytics script, no cookie banner and nothing to consent to, because there is no server collecting anything in the first place.
Reuse and citation
The writing and the datasets are published under CC BY 4.0, and the code under the MIT licence. Please reuse any of it, with credit.
Official figures republished here keep their own publisher's licence, which is recorded with each dataset.
Corrections
Corrections are especially welcome. On a site whose whole claim is provenance, a correction is a contribution rather than a complaint.