Dear all, Greetings from Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA)!
CBGA (www.cbgaindia.org) is an independent, non-profit policy research organisation based in New Delhi. It strives to inform public discourses through rigorous analysis of government budgets in India; it also tries to foster people's participation on a range of policy issues by demystifying them. Increasingly, people across the country are keen to understand and participate meaningfully in discussions on government budgets. But, the limited availability of relevant and accessible information on budgets at different levels has been a hindrance in this regard. In this context, CBGA is striving to strengthen the discourse and demand for availability of all budget information in the public domain in a timely and accessible manner, at all levels of government in the country. As part of the efforts in this sphere, CBGA, in collaboration with a number of other organisations, has developed - www.openbudgetsindia.org - an Open Data Portal on Budgets in India. The portal - Open Budgets India (OBI) - is meant to be a comprehensive and user-friendly open data portal, which can facilitate free, easy and timely access to relevant data on budgets. The portal provides budget information of different tiers of government in India (Union Budget, State Budgets, and Budgets of several Municipal Corporations across the country) in accessible and open (non-proprietary) formats. The four major features of the portal, as of now (in the beta version), are: - Budget documents (i.e. the original PDF documents); - Machine Readable Datasets (for those budget documents, where it was technically feasible to prepare machine readable datasets); - Visualizations (or infographics) generated from the machine readable datasets; and - Budget basics (for greater familiarity with budget concepts, processes and documents). This is an on-going project; in the coming months, we will work towards expanding the coverage of budget data available on the portal and present a greater proportion of the data in machine readable formats (i.e. CSVs and MS-Excel, instead of only PDFs). Moreover, we will also be adding a database for facilitating inter-State comparability of budget data across years. However, we felt it is necessary to carry out this expansion as an incremental, public process. Hence, we would like to share the beta version of the portal with some of the important potential users and seek feedback and suggestions for improving our efforts. We are planning to present the beta version of the portal in a* Consultation (“Opening Up the Access to Budget Data in India”) on 27th of January 2017, Friday (from 1.30 pm to 5.00 pm), which would be held at Juniper Hall, India Habitat Centre (IHC), Lodhi Road in New Delhi.* The Consultation will also include a Panel Discussion with experts on what should government authorities and civil society organisations pursue, in the coming years, so as to ensure that people get free, easy and timely access to relevant budget data at various levels of government. *We would like to invite you to please join us in this Consultation; your participation would add immense value to the discussions.* We will share with you the Agenda for the Consultation shortly. We sincerely hope you be able to take out time to join us in the programme on 27th of January, this Friday. We look forward to hearing from you. With best regards, Subrat Das -- Datameet is a community of Data Science enthusiasts in India. Know more about us by visiting http://datameet.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "datameet" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
