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CBGA has been carrying out cutting-edge policy research and advocacy, from the perspective of poor and underprivileged since its inception one and a half decades ago. As we moved forward taking intensive steps in this direction by involving people in policy debates, one of our aims has been to become the ‘go to’ organization in the country on analysis of fiscal governance issues from a people’s perspective.

But in our early days, the need for resources, both human and technical for supporting the organization when it was expanding, was critical. We had a promising outlook, but we operated at a smaller scale. We were trying to balance our focus on credible research and evidence based advocacy. In a few years of being set up as an independent organisation, we came across a call for funding that was looking for strengthening independent policy research institutions. This was 2009. We keenly applied to this process as it had announced core funding support- also known as the Think Tank Initiative (TTI). Selections were to be made through a competitive process, and we were a little apprehensive, but the outcome of the process was delightful. CBGA was selected to become part of a cohort of 16 Think Tanks in the South Asia region who made it to the final stage. Our entry into TTI opened the doors for us for moving closer to our aim, by taking impressive strides.

The growing importance of core funding to non-profits is widely recognised. As a paper by Institute for Voluntary Action and Research, London notes that core funding is critical to organisational stability and sustainability for a myriad of reasons, including: strengthening independence; buffering against unexpected hardship; contributing to organisational overheads; and buying time and space for thinking and planning. In our case too, the core grant was enabling in several ways. A sense of security that basic costs will be met for a few consecutive years was vital at that juncture.

A central feature of TTI support was to connect funding to improvements made in three key areas- research capacity and quality, policy engagement and communication, and overall organizational performance. A clear focus on improving these three core pillars of the organisation persuaded us to make significant efforts through the duration of the funding, which ends with FY 2018-19.

We endeavored to scale up our research agenda, as a result of which, longer-term governance and policy issues which are also very relevant for our mandate, became a significant focus of our work. Provision of this stable funding support for eight years helped us set a research agenda that could respond to important policy debates in India on public financing of social sectors. We made efforts to expand the canvas of our research, focusing on different states in India, to capture important trends and scenarios from inter-state comparisons. This also enabled us to take up research in those sectors or on such issues, which are part of CBGA’s core mandate, but they have not attracted any project funding from donors.  Another important dimension of our work, ‘research quality assurance’ has always been of high importance to us. Our learning from the TTI community helped us develop appropriate mechanisms towards ensuring this well during the TTI journey.

In promoting the grantee organisation’s sustainability and effectiveness, TTI laid stress on strengthening research capacity. The core funding support enabled us to attract highly qualified researchers and also retain our team members better. We also wanted to contribute to developing the capacities of other stakeholders on public finance issues. This thinking guided us to take steps towards building an initiative that had the potential to facilitate research through the use of budget data by a wider group of interested researchers. We created a portal on government budgets in India, called the Open Budgets India that provides India’s government budget data in a more open, accessible and comprehensible format through technology enabled ways. However, as far as the resources for designing this portal were concerned, we also had to depend heavily on mobilising support from other donors.

TTI’s thrust on policy linkage also led us to take a closer look at the uptake of our work, going all the way from knowledge generation, to its proper dissemination, and influencing policy change. The support increased our ability to engage the target audience in different areas of our work. One such endevour was our focus on strengthening engagement with the governments at the sub-national level as part of work on the open budget portal, under which we are engaging with the Government of Assam to take steps for making the State’s budget data open and improving financial management. Our effort to engage specific audiences to leveraging change remains a work in progress.

We relied on TTI’s core funding for several critical needs, and it benefited us in more ways than one through these years. But the support comes to an end now. These are also times witnessing an overall decline in funding for policy research work in countries like India. One hopes that the Indian philanthropic foundations too will recognize the importance of independent policy research and will come forward to provide core or institutional funding support to organisations in this field.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and don’t necessarily reflect the position of CBGA. You can reach Happy Pant at happy@cbgaindia.org.