Overview
The state budget of the Government of Assam is spread across several grants. One way to assess a state’s capacity to deliver justice is by looking at the allocation of budgets under grants related to Police, Prison, and Judiciary. In Assam, these are represented by Grant No. 3 (Administration of Justice), Grant No. 14(Police), and Grant No. 15(Jails). In the budget for 2022-23, Assam allocated 6% of its total expenditure to police, which is higher than the average expenditure on police by other states (4.3%). The budget allocation for “Administration of Justice” is around 0.6% whereas for “Jails” it is only about 0.15% of the entire budget. These allocations represent the priorities of the state government. But how can citizens and civil society organizations, who work around improving access to justice, ensure that their demands are being represented within this budget?
To answer this question, we need to build the capacity to explore and analyze past and current budget datasets & documents. We should be able to inquire about the current state of affairs and the allocation and utilization of funds by the governments to improve access to justice. Often the technical and subject matter expertise required to deal with this information along with time and time and resource-related constraints restricts the capacity of citizens to engage with the state.
The objective behind building the platform - Budgets for Justice - Assam is to lessen the time it takes for people to collate, explore, analyze & visualize data related to budgets. We have curated budget datasets for the last 5 years for the three grants related to law and justice (Administration of Justice, Police, and Prisons). The data platform can be used to explore and analyze the trends and patterns of budget allocation and expenditure under these budget heads.
Processing Budget Documents
Datasets and Tools
Explore and analyse the 2022-23 budget for Assam 
Explore patterns in budget allocation for law and justice related schemes in Assam.
Download law and justice related datasets.
Download state budget datasets.
Case Studies
The case studies highlight the current state of law and justice-related budgeting in Assam. Check these links to know more.
Here we analyse the share of the budget for Open Air Jails in the state budget of Assam.
Here we analyse the overall police budget on specific indicators taken from the India Justice Report.
Here we analyse the fund utilisation patter of the NALSA fund by Assam State Legal Services Authority.