But let me tell you something about DISHA - our organisation. DISHA stands for Development Initiative for Social and Human Action. It was founded in 1985 and is located on the western coast of India. It primarily works with tribals, forest labour, forestland cultivators, agricultural labourers, mineworkers and construction labourers. It is a membership-based organisation, and its membership at present is roughly 80,000 people. This is a paid membership. Members pay annual subscriptions to the various Unions.

As far as the Gujurati State is concerned, it has a population of 45 million. The tribal or indigenous population constitutes 15% of the total population. 12% are landless labourers. Nearly 27% of the total families of this state live below the poverty line and this is 11,000 rupees at present. The gap between rich and poor, unemployment, and the growing slums in the major cities of the state, are some of the major problems that we are facing.

When DISHA began to look at the development of the tribal areas and other areas of the state it began to realise that it had to look at the expenditure by the state. This is how it got involved with budget work. We knew nothing about the budget, absolutely nothing, and my background is Geography, nothing to do with economics. I was more a unionist, even at present I’m a unionist if I have to describe myself. I was more on the road shouting slogans, leading marches and protests, strikes and all kinds of those things. Most people, especially the people who are in a social justice movement, are quite wary about looking at those facts and figures etc. I also had very little inclination to get involved in the budget work.

But it was a compulsion because every year the government was coming out and saying they were spending so many Karol – a Karol is 10 million – of rupees for the development of the tribal people, for agricultural labourers, for hawkers, for mineworkers, and there was, in fact, not a clue for us as to where to put our hands and how to find out if what they were saying was correct. This led us to look, after some struggle, to where we could get this information. Someone pointed out that it is in the state budget or the budget books, and this is how we got involved in this.

It was educating ourselves. We learned the technical aspect, the definition of words used in budget books through budget manuals. Karl Nixa was the general secretary and I remember meeting him for the first time. I was a little bit worried that I might be making some mistakes as he had had years of experience dealing with the budget. So we learned all these things from the budget manuals, finance commission reports prepared by the central governments under the president’s orders of the government of India, and progress and performance reports that each department publishes every year.

Besides that, in the initial stages it was very difficult to collect this information because you have the whole government department which gives you this budget, but they give you this after every thing is over. So the easiest thing we found was that as soon as the budget was presented in the state assembly – again let me tell you that the state has 45 million people. We had 186 people elected. Every 150,000 to 600,000 people elect one representative. That is their constituency. So when the budget is presented in the state assembly, on the same day we collect from the members those books which were given to them because for most of the members, the budget books mean nothing to them - just something to dump in a corner. So we got it easily. This is our major source of information. Our state budget is 17,000 Karol, which are 170,000 million rupees. Since we were trying to find out how much allocation tribal regions get, we were forced to look at all the department budgets of the state, which provided us with the comprehensive picture of state funding, vis-à-vis, the tribal regions. I’m simply giving one case study on how we began as some background.

To be precise in our figures and our analysis we studied and understood the accounting system and classified the data according to the accounting code used by the government of India. And I must tell you here that to establish ourselves we challenged one of the experts’ articles written on health in Economical and Political Weekly saying that the figures that he used, were based on an inappropriate methodology. In fact the methodology should have been this, and this data is not classified according to the accounting code. That was a kind of debate in a very prestigious journal in India simply to establish for ourselves that the matter that we use is correct, and our data can’t be challenged.

After analysing the data on the tribal the result was astonishing. It revealed the injustices done to the tribal region in the allocation of financial resources. We published a monograph on the fact of state discrimination against the tribal region. This was widely circulated to the elected representatives, political parties, press, columnists, public policy groups and other persons and NGOs active in public life. Also we published a small four to five page write-up on the demand on grant - every department has to go to assembly to get their expenditure in full which is called a demand on grant - for each of the development departments, vis-à-vis the spending of the tribal region, for discussion in the state assembly. Giving a four-page note to the elected members of the state assembly has changed the entire nature of the debate. Earlier the elected representative used to attempt more allegations and highlight small, petty things. Here they were provided with facts and figures and information. The general information concerning the poor will change the nature of the debate within the assembly; and this has now become a regular activity of DISHA. Every year we do this in our state.

It is with this background that we thought we must make other social justice movement activists and organisations aware of the need to look at the distribution of financial resources by the state to the poor. I must mention that our training is mainly for social justice groups. We have limited ourselves to training human rights groups and the people working on the different issues of the poor; meals for tribals; for Delhi’s untouchables; groups working on women’s issues; children’s issues, and on the common property resource. These are the major issues of the NGOs working in our country. Our strategy at present is to generate a greater interest to look at financial allocations of the state, and the district and the municipal corporations.

Budget is a very dry subject. Nobody would like, especially those who are in the movement, to see this whole pile of books which comes in. It’s almost twenty-two books with twenty-two performance reports and twenty-two progress reports. If we look at the government of India’s budget, there are forty-two departments; there are forty-two annual reports; there are forty-two progress reports and there are forty-two demand on grants besides the new survey and the summaries of the various budgets. So there is a heap of books – you need at least two persons just to carry these to your office. So our strategy is to generate interest first. This we do by analysing the issue that the NGO of a particular state works on. We go to a particular state and we first ask them to send us the material, their annual report and figure out one issue, and then look at their own budgets, budgets of their own state, just to generate and analyse them from their perspective or our perspective supplemented by them. This we do by analysing the issue at the NGO of the particular state we work on. Hence it is called a guest-study matter.

First to the limitation. They begin to realise: "Oh, I didn’t realise this. I would have been much more effective if I had the idea or the knowledge about this." They realise they had a lack of understanding of the whole issue that they were dealing with for years because they would never look at this aspect, and we would explain how powerful they can become with the information on finances once they understand the budget. We insist that only people with a genuine interest in learning about the budget can enter the programme. And also we insist that the leadership of the organisation must attend, because, if the budget programme is to be made popular, it is the leadership who can make a change or introduce changes in the policies of the organisation.

That a person should have ambition, that he/she should have an interest to look at the data and its interpretation. I must say that the majority of social justice activists don’t like to look at the figures. They are not very good at accounts. They, in fact, fear figures; and I remember a first training programme where literally you had to write down a figure and ask them to read it, and if there were ten people, almost eight to nine people would make mistakes in reading these figures because these figures are in thousands. You have to make sense of them by reading them, and a slight error in reading them is an error of again a million or thousands … if there’s a hundred thousand we call it one lag. One lag is easy to read. But if you have 120 Karor, 25 lakh and a few thousand, then it’s very difficult to read those figures, especially for social movement activists. This is mainly one part in the one-day training programme.

The second part is that we expose them to the Indian accounting system. Then on their own issue they can get the breakdown of the final allocation which can equip them precisely in building their argument. The accounting system is quite elaborate. They have divided all the subjects – say for education – into sectors. Then the subjects are further divided into sub-sectors; sub-sectors are divided into programmes; programmes are divided into schemes; and schemes are divided into objects. So if you have general education, this is the one subject. Then you have a sub-sector. General education is a sector. Sub-sector is 01 which is the primary education; 02 is the secondary education and 03 is the higher education; 04 is the adult education, etc. Then within 01 you have 105 which is training, 106 is expenditure on the books, 107 is expenditure on dresses and other things and so on. It just goes on like that. The 105 is further divided by the state. It goes right up to how much money one can pinpoint goes out in salaries, wages, child allowance, in purchasing of equipment, even finding out how much money from this budget is given for advances to the government officer to buy fence or to buy advance loans for other particular reasons. This is all in the accounting system, which is highly elaborate.

Also we show them the budget books and teach them how they can hold the department official, district official, or elected representatives accountable by finding out whether the money spent in a particular way - on roads, on deepening of tanks, on digging of wells - whether they are being built or not. It is in our budget books. One can really find out, which we do in our office, that the money that was put in was spent. We write to the village saying that this money, the ten thousand rupees, was spent in constructing a road from your village to the main road linking your village to the main road. Please let us know whether this road is built or not. And you get an answer from them. Now this generated a tremendous interest by those groups who attempt this. And this is applicable for human rights groups, women’s groups and even groups working on stream cultivation and agricultural issues. The budget cut across all the issues that most of the groups or social justice movements are working on. This is our one–day training programme.

We have another feature, which is the four-day training programme, and this is in-house training. Firstly we generate interest. Then some of them come back to us and we tell them that they are welcome to come to DISHA. When they come to DISHA, we spend out of four days two days in actual teaching in how they should classify the data according to the accounting code, which is fixed by the government of India; and every state government has to account every level of expenditure under their head. So two days are spent on that, and another two days are spent on interpreting the data and preparing the write-up for making out their case; and discussing the write-up, which they have written; and specially the whole skill of analysing. So far we are called to conduct training programmes for several states as well as in Nepal.

I see a great potential for budget work in the Indian sub-continent since accounting systems could be more or less the same. The analysis of the data can become much easier.

Finally, in our training programme and budget analysis, I must say that we are biased. We choose pro-poor and also the anti- poor actions of the government expressing budget through financial allocation. We study the pattern of spending of allocation and make our case with this information. Since we have a people base along with an information base we feel much stronger to push our views on the government and we hope that every social justice movement and group in India equips themselves with such information, so that their fight against the annual distribution of financial resources helps create a society based on equity and social justice. Thank you.

QUESTION: As far as the nature of the debate, I’m wondering if you could give me some examples so that I can get a better sense of how that’s happened. Secondly, can you tell me are you going to be trying to replicate this around the rest of the country, and if so, how are you going to be doing this?

MISTRY: I remember the first item that we prepared. First of all it was a question for us what to write in there. The right-wing government first approached us to purchase the entire information that we had on the budgets, because they were in opposition. Anyway, we presented this write-up and in this write-up we took the old demands, and these demands are to be discussed in the budget assembly, say, e.g. that you have a demand of the health department of so many Karols of rupees. We find out exactly what the demand contains from the budget books, how much money they are asking for primary health.

Within primary you have the various systems of medicine which are homeopathy, which is allopathy, which is ayurvedic. Within allopathy again you have the rural health centre, the urban health centre. Within that again you have different medical education programmes or the aid education programme. All sorts of programmes are in there, and we write precisely what is the impact if the money for the millennial education programme is decreasing or increasing, and what did they ask last year and what are they asking this year. What are the possible reasons for decrease and why did they not use the money which were allocated before, because in our budget books previous years spending is also accounted for.

Gujurat is considered a very progressive state and yet when we look at the health index in the state, it is appalling. The doctors, sport houses and people, the expenditure on medical institutions in the state: these are the things and the whole structure of the health department. This information goes in the hand of the elected representative who has limited education, so they had to alert each other about something. That is how they came to pass their time. With this analysis we begin to tell the number in figures and when we write the figures we don’t write 100,000 like this (demonstrating). What we do say is this one lakh. So this is in figures and this is in words, so that a person can read. It is not just in absolute terms of writing figures of almost ten digits or twelve digits. So that’s how it changed and it changed in relationship also. We replicate or we try to replicate it. Some of the groups have already done it - including states with a massive budget that have never been checked or questioned before. We replicate the same thing for the union budget this year.

QUESTION: I must congratulate Mr Mistry on the very excellent discourse. He told me some things that I already knew, but which I would not be able to express in the same fine manner. I would just like to supplement what he has just said. In India the budget system is such that it is highly streamlined and it is under the various articles of the Constitution of India. And the budget system is so designed as to ensure, among other things, complete transparency. So when we are talking about the transparency in budget, I must say that the budgetary system in India has complete transparency in it. However, in order to see through that transparency, one must understand and know how to read budgets, and organisations like DISHA and the Center on Budget Studies in Maharashta my organization in Karnatika are organisations which are striving towards that aim of inculcating training among the groups which are interested in the welfare and upliftment of the underprivileged. This is all I wanted to say to supplement what Mr Mistry had very ably demonstrated and I thank him for that.

MISTRY: Just a quick thing. The accounting system is so interesting and comprehensive. If they start with 20, it’s a tax income. If you start with 10, it’s a non-tax income. If you start with 1, it’s a grant: 2 and 3 are reserved for expenditure code; 4 and 5 are capital expenditure code; 6 and 7 are loans and advances; and any major aid code that starts from 8 is a public expenditure. So if you want to find out what is the income from general education, the general education code is 2202 so this is revenue expenditure on general education; if you want to find out the capital expenditure on general education, start from 4202; if you want to find out the loans and advances in education, it’s a 6202; if you want to find out the income from education, this is 0212. This is how it goes, so understanding the accounting system is so amazing. Once you get and read it, it unfolds a lot of things.

QUESTION: An accounting system is a chart of an account. The accounting system deals not only with these things, so if you’d like to say it is a uniform accounting system, this story is totally different. So here in these things, your explanation has related that it is based on a chart of accounts rather than a well-defined accounting system.

MISTRY: I don’t know whether I would agree to that or not. Nonetheless my purpose is: I want to keep a check on the money that is spent by the state, and I do not want to be challenged at any moment by anybody so that is the purpose of understanding the system. To challenge the very government with their own data, with their own analysis, with their own classification - that’s the basic objective that I’m concerned for and not the accounting system.

QUESTION: Well, we need a new word for accounting systems that are totally transparent, but obscure to almost everybody, including an educated person who tries to pick them up. But my question is this: You said that you were interested in expenditure in the budget, but not the actual expenditures. i.e. what do you know and what can you tell us about the relationship between the budget figures and what is actually expended in the field on these various subjects?

MISTRY: Take the example of the construction of classrooms. How much money is spent on the construction of classrooms in that particular budget year over the year? In our state we have a shortage of almost 33,000 classrooms and 40,000 teachers. This shortage is mainly in the tribal areas, areas far from the major centres. You know Public Works department budget years – how many roads they construct in village roads or district roads, and is it to locate whether that money has been spent there or not, and raise the question by doing a literal survey of whether the roads have been constructed or not.

In the irrigation department, you have the head of the mining division. Within mining you have the deepening of wells, construction of new wells, and there are a number of schemes. And they say particularly that in a particular district or village, they will be deepening the wells with so many thousands of rupees budget. So it is easy to find out whether the money is spent or not, and if not, then raise it a) in assembly b) you write and c) give it to the press and raise it, thereby holding them accountable. We will assist them in the survey on that. There’s a limitation of the budget that it can’t give you all the answers, but nonetheless, it gives you many clues to begin and put your case quite forcefully.

QUESTION: You talked about the replicability in terms of having trained groups that went out and did their own budget analysis. How many groups that you trained end up doing their own budget analysis, and how many, in fact, do you teach enough about budgets that they then understand your analysis and they can use it?

MISTRY: I think that I forgot to tell you that we are not a budget NGO. We are a social movement and that has also kept us a bit limited. And we want to keep ourselves limited. So what we do is that we try to approach all the social and union movements and NGOs that are active in this field. We hold a few seminars. Some of them pick it up. To cite a few examples: in Bombay, there’s an organisation called YUVA, which is beginning to work on a municipal corporation. They came down to Umdulanti and went and did it. There are some of them who came, who learnt, but who did not do – maybe because of other reasons. In the 4-day training programme we simply exposed them and trained them in classifying the data without making any mistakes; entering the thousands and thousands of entries; checking it manually that there is no human error; and then to work out the percentage on that and taking out the seals of various percentage, various major head, minor head, survey head. With the different departments this is a huge and enormous task. You need a group of people in an establishment with patience and understanding. It’s not necessarily everyone who came who did it, but nonetheless, I must say that in Tammellarai which was the first group, we had a lot of NGOs. They came, they sat down, they did it , went back and they did the same replication in the state of Tammellaru. They are doing it presently. Not only that, but we found out that this is the only indicator, and perhaps a very effective tool to monitor the commitment of any government on the issues of social development and on the issues of human rights. Or any issues, whether that of drinking water, right to employment, right to health or anything. That is the best indicator available because it has the express intention of the national state and the state government if we are aware of making allocations regarding finance. So we do not say how you should interpret; we simply advance a model of how they can do it.

QUESTION: I am particularly impressed that you can get people to come to your trainings for four days. How do you select the individuals that go through your training? Is there a stipend to their organisation, and what kinds of follow-up do you do, because it’s just amazing to me. We have a hard time getting people to come for one day.