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It is widely acknowledged that sharing of data and relevant information in public domain is a major step towards enhancing transparency and accountability in governance. However, in the Indian context, both the availability of data and the way such data is shared have had notorious reputations. Financial data, more precisely budgets, produced by governments has also been fraught with similar problems. On one hand, availability of budget data diminishes drastically as one moves from the level of Union and State Governments to District and sub-district levels. On the other hand, even where such information is made public, both standardisation of such data across different tiers of government and in turn, its usability pose major bottlenecks.

 In this context, the Right to Information Act of 2005 can be said to have brought about a landmark change in so far as access to information held by public authorities is considered. However, what have been much less discussed are the standards in which data can be made public. This has a crucial role in making such data accessible and transparent.

The question which then arises is, “Are there established ways or standards in which data can be shared?” Taking a look at the existing policy in India for data sharing norms brings us to the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) of 2012 brought out by the Union Government’s Department of Science and Technology. NDSAP, termed as the ‘open data policy’ of Government of India, calls for proactive sharing of data by different government agencies, both at the national and sub-national levels, in standardised human and machine-readable formats. At the heart of this policy lie the principles of openness, flexibility, quality, security, machine-readability (processable by machines) and transparency.

The scope of the policy extends to all data (except for information pertaining to the negative list) created by using public funds and owned by different government agencies, ministries and departments of the Union and State Governments in India. Based on the detailed implementation guideline for NDSAP published in November 2015, a Project Management Unit was set up with a pivotal role in managing the open data repository as well as in building the capacities of government departments.

Given the existence of such a policy, it is necessary to see if and to what extent it has been followed by governments at different tiers to make their budget data more open and easily accessible.

Open data efforts by the Union Government: the Open Government Data Platform – (data.gov.in)

Following the notification of NDSAP in 2012, the open government data platform of the Union Government was launched with much fanfare in October, 2012, in compliance with the national policy. Some of the praiseworthy elements incorporated on this platform were to publish data descriptions or metadata along with data, create a citizens’ engagement mechanism through feedback forms, bring in Application Programming Interface, better known as APIs, for community involvement in refining the platform, etc. However, in terms of publishing budget data in open formats on this platform, not much has been achieved. Inspite of the conspicuous mention of budgets as part of the shareable list of information in NDSAP, availability of the same on data.gov.in has been far and few with no concerted effort in updating them regularly or covering all detailed budget documents which are published annually. This has severely restricted the use of this platform as a reliable source of regularly updated and complete data on government budgets.

Initiatives at the State Level

The uptake of open data policy with regard to budget data at the State level has been less than impressive with different States being at very different levels of progress on this front. If we try to map the policy changes at the State level, only a handful of States like Sikkim, Odisha, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, etc. have made efforts to either bring in their own open data policies keeping in line with the principles of NDSAP or adopt the latter.  But, even for most of these States (except Sikkim), budget data still remains locked in closed formats like PDF and are not published in formats prescribed by NDSAP like Excel (XLS), Comma Separated Values (CSV), Open Document Formats for Spreadsheet (ODS), etc.

Open data on budgets of Urban Local Bodies

As one moves to the local levels of governance, accessibility to financial data in any form becomes difficult. As regards the Municipal Corporations, less than half of the total 212 of them publish their budgets online. Obtaining financial information for the rest, therefore, remains an uphill task ranging from physically acquiring relevant documents to filing RTIs. In such a backdrop, it is not surprising that there has hardly been any discourse on data standardisation and open formats for budgets at urban local government levels. However, it is worthwhile to mention a rare example of Pune Municipal Corporation, which has adopted the tenets of NDSAP to make their budget data open.

Thus, the implementation of India’s open data policy has remained incomplete at multiple levels with visible gaps in its enforcement as well as the orientation of government departments towards opening up their financial data. This, in turn, has stunted the beneficial effect that such a policy could have had in removing the information asymmetry between the public and the government. It remains the responsibility of the Union Government to build the capacities of government entities and ensure greater collaboration, especially at the sub-national levels, for successful adoption of such a policy. Simply having an open data policy will not be enough to open up India’s budgets and reap their true benefits.

 

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of CBGA. You can reach Simonti Chakraborty at simonti@cbgaindia.org.