Methodology

Every figure is read from a publication of the Government of India. Nothing is modelled, estimated or interpolated by us, and nothing is taken from a secondary compilation.

V1 draws on three document families, and no others. Adding a fourth is a decision, not a convenience — the set is deliberately small so that every figure on the site can be traced without a reader having to learn a new document.

Budget at a Glance

One per Budget, five editions. The Union aggregates: receipts, expenditure, the four deficits, and each deficit’s published share of GDP. Read for the Overview and Budget versus Actual.

CGA Monthly Accounts

Fifty releases across five years. Cumulative receipts, expenditure and deficits month by month, plus the year-end provisional. Read for the Monthly Tracker and for the within-year position on the Overview.

Demands for Grants — Summary

One per Budget, five editions. Ministry allocations at Budget and Revised Estimate, split into revenue and capital. Read for the Ministries page.

Source documents are downloaded from the publishing institution and stored by content hash, so the copy a figure was read from can always be re-checked against the copy that is displayed. A document whose contents change is a new document, not an edit.

The same series carries very different meanings across the fiscal year, so estimate type is always shown and never mixed within a comparison.

Budget Estimate (BE)

The amount presented to Parliament at the start of the financial year.

Revised Estimate (RE)

The revision presented partway through the year, usually alongside the following year’s Budget.

Provisional

CGA figures for a period that has been reported but not yet finalised.

Actual

The audited final outcome, published well after the year closes.

Estimate type is recorded separately from the period a figure covers. A CGA cumulative April–February figure is a provisional cumulative figure — the two facts are independent, and treating them as one enum is a common way to end up comparing incompatible numbers.

Every figure carries a verification status, shown wherever it is displayed. A figure is never shown without one.

Unverified

Extracted, but not yet checked by automated rules or a person.

Automatically validated

Passed the reconciliation and range checks described below.

Manually verified

A person compared the figure against the source page and confirmed it.

Review required

A check failed, or the source document changed shape. Flagged rather than silently corrected.

Extraction failures are flagged, not fixed. Automated checks confirm that units match expectations, that components reconcile to their totals, that cumulative series do not decline, that periods are not duplicated, and that estimate types are not mixed within a series. Anything failing a check is held for review.

Ratios and percentages are computed at display time from stored figures, never stored as figures themselves. Each carries its formula and the citations of its inputs, so a derived number can be checked in the same way as a reported one.

Shares of GDP are the exception, and are notcomputed here. Budget at a Glance prints each deficit's share of GDP in parentheses beneath the amount, against the GDP estimate current on the day the Budget was presented. That figure is taken as published.

The reason is that nominal GDP is revised repeatedly, so a ratio depends entirely on which vintage its denominator came from. Dividing by a GDP series sourced separately would produce a number that disagrees, in the first decimal, with the very document it cites — and a reader checking the page against the PDF would find a discrepancy we introduced.

Ministry allocations come from the Demands for Grants, which state them before recoveries are netted off. Union totals in Budget at a Glance are net. The two therefore do not reconcile, and the ten ministries shown here do not sum to Union expenditure — neither because a ministry is missing nor because a figure is wrong.

Ministry-level final Actuals are absent by design. They require the Appropriation Accounts and grant-level reconciliation across a ministry structure that is reorganised between years, which is outside this source set. The Ministries page therefore compares Budget Estimate against Revised Estimate — a real question, and one the sources can answer — while Union-level Actuals appear on Budget versus Actual.

Figures are never overwritten. When a publication revises a figure, the new value is recorded alongside the old one with its own source and publication date, and the earlier value remains retrievable. This means the site can show what was known at a point in time, not only what is currently believed.

Union finance figures are published in ₹ crore and are shown here in ₹ crore or ₹ lakh crore, whichever is more readable for the view, with the unit always stated. Digit grouping follows Indian convention.

Changes in a percentage are reported in percentage points, written as such — a deficit moving from 86.5% to 92.7% of Budget Estimate has risen by 6.2 percentage points, not by 6.2%.

This site covers the Union government only. State finances, state development loans, off-budget borrowing and general government aggregates are out of scope, and no figure here should be read as representing general government.