About

I work on public finance and public policy, and I write about economics and geoeconomics more broadly. This site is where that writing lives, alongside the data behind it.

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 ina 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.

Reuse and citation

The writing and the datasets are published underCC 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.

Getting in touch

Corrections are especially welcome, and on a site whose whole claim is provenance, a correction is a contribution rather than a complaint. Write to hello@anupamkumar.org.