In the modern world, every government aims at maximising the economic and social welfare of its citizens and infrastructure needs.

It requires a lot of planning and policy making. The main aim of our project is to develop several visual idioms to visualise budgets put forth by the government to make policy making and planning easier.

Multiple tiers of government are set up in geographically vast countries with heterogeneous populations with the belief that they enable more efficient and equitable provisioning of public goods through co-operation, coordination and competition between central and subnational governments through a predefined set of rules. In India, there are three tiers of government: Union, State and Local. Local Bodies are both rural and urban. Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) are of three types namely Municipal Corporations, Municipal Councils and Nagar Panchayats and suburban government bodies.

Each of these tiers has constitutionally mandated responsibilities to raise resources and spend them. An annual statement of receipts and expenditure are presented by all tiers of government which together constitute government budget in India.

-> A household’s income is ascertained before spending occurs. A government, on the other hand, estimates its expenditure requirements before mobilising resources to meet its expenditure requirements.

-> Unlike in the case of a household, a government’s revenues do not have to match its expenditures. It has a variety of methods for managing the gap between spending and revenue; also, it needs to be responsible for ensuring that deficits are sustainable.

-> The very motive behind government budgeting is different from that of budgeting by private households.

Most budget documents like Annual Financial Statement, Detailed Demand for Grants, etc. contain information for 3 financial years. For instance, the Union Budget 2017-18 will contain figures for 2015-16 Actuals, 2016-17 Revised Estimates and 2017-18 Budget Estimates.

Budget Estimates (BE) refer to the amounts of expenditure ‘projected’ by the government for the ongoing / approaching financial year (April 1, 2017 – March 31, 2018).

After the initial projection of expenditure for an ensuing financial year, the government revises those projections after six months of the concerned financial year are over. These ‘revised projections’ are known as Revised Estimates (RE).

Actuals: Actuals refer to the amounts actually spent by the government in a previous financial year, which have been audited and certified by the office of C&AG of India.

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The aim of this project is to meticulously acquire data, use specific visual idioms, analyse, infer and provide a detailed description based on the gathered information over the Budget Allocation of India conclusive of current and old records in the form of a web application.

Obtaining the dataset is by far the most crucial and complex task, following the overall structure of the project acquiring this data was hard as the government imposes various clauses/changes during the course of the financial year.

After we have acquired the data, we need to choose specific visual idioms to make sure that the data is represented uniformly and the user can make sense of the information presented

Based on the visual Idioms used we can infer a trend of the dataset and this information can be used to identify analytical approaches and changes over the years.

Most of the datasets used in this project have been obtained from Kaggle or Open Budgets India. For one of the modules, we did a text visualization of the Budget financial Speech of Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman. In some cases where a direct dataset was not available, we generated our own dataset from websites like wikipedia.

Module 1: https://www.kaggle.com/mathurinache/federalbudgetshares19412020

Module 2: https://www.indiatoday.in/business/budget-2020/story/full-text-of-budget-2020-speech-by-finance-minister-nirmala-sitharaman-1642337-2020-02-01#:~:text=Hon'ble%20Speaker%2C,for%20the%20year%202020%2D2021.&text=In%20May%202019%2C%20Prime%20Minister,with%20all%20humility%20and%20dedication

Module 3: https://union2020.openbudgetsindia.org/en/expenditure/

Module 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_state_budgets

Module 5: https://openbudgetsindia.org/dataset/union-budget-2020-21-tax-revenue

Module 6: https://openbudgetsindia.org/dataset/department-of-health-and-family-welfare-2019-20-budget