Budget Analysis and Resource Allocation for Tribals in Gujarat

When budgets are announced in legislative assemblies, they often arrive as thick documents filled with technical jargon, cryptic line items, and sector-wise allocations that few ordinary citizens can decipher. For tribal communities in Gujarat, this opacity has historically meant that promises made on paper rarely translated into outcomes on the ground. That changed when a civil society organisation called DISHA (Developing Initiatives for Social and Human Action) started doing something remarkable: it began reading the state budget on behalf of the poor, line by line, and telling citizens exactly where the money was meant to go, and where it was actually going.

Why budget analysis matters for tribal welfare 🔗

Gujarat has a substantial Scheduled Tribe population concentrated in the eastern belt of the state, stretching from the Dangs in the south to the Aravalli foothills in the north. Their development is supposed to be funded through the Tribal Area Sub-Plan (TASP), a mechanism introduced in 1974 to earmark financial allocations in proportion to the ST population, with funds that are meant to be non-divertible and to cover nearly every aspect of tribal life.

The theory is elegant. The practice, however, has been messier. Independent studies have observed that several states, Gujarat included, have at times earmarked funds under the Tribal Sub-Plan below the share warranted by their ST population, and that budgetary norms are often not followed in letter or spirit. This is where an informed civil society organisation becomes invaluable. Without someone to audit allocations against outcomes, the gap between stated policy and actual spending remains invisible to the people it affects most.

The birth of a budget-literate movement 🔗

DISHA was founded in 1985 by Madhusudan Mistry with the aim of mobilising Dalits, forest workers, tribal women, and casual labourers in Gujarat. The organisation began as a membership-based social movement, and its early work focused on labour rights, forest land cultivation, and unorganised sector concerns. By the mid-1990s, DISHA pivoted toward something no Indian NGO had really attempted before: using the state budget itself as a tool of advocacy.

Mistry received support from the Ford Foundation to spend time at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in the United States to learn how that organisation used budget analysis to influence public expenditure. DISHA then became, in all likelihood, the first developing country NGO to systematically apply budget analysis to a sub-national government, in this case the state of Gujarat.

How DISHA cracked open the Gujarat budget 🔗

The Gujarat state budget, for much of DISHA’s early years, was not easily released to the public; the government published only summary features on its website, and DISHA’s direct requests for full budget documents were rebuffed. So the organisation developed a workaround that was equal parts ingenious and exhausting: on the day of the budget speech, DISHA analysts would obtain budget documents from opposition members of the legislature, work through the night to simplify and interpret the figures, and disseminate the analysis to parliamentarians, the media, and civil society by the next morning.

For a time, DISHA was effectively the only publicly accessible source of meaningful budget information in Gujarat. Its alternative budget analysis covered sectors, schemes, departments, and compared current allocations against past ones, reviewing the state budget the same evening it was presented in the assembly.

Finding the gaps in tribal allocations 🔗

DISHA’s analyses consistently exposed uncomfortable truths. Allocations under the Tribal Sub-Plan often failed to match the ST share of Gujarat’s population. Funds earmarked for tribal development were sometimes parked under general heads that had little direct impact on poor tribal households, such as infrastructure spending on roads and buildings that did not reach interior tribal belts. In the education sector, DISHA went further, looking at enrolment data from the Director of Primary Education for the period 1984-85 to 1997-98 and arguing, using budget figures and enrolment trends, that state data on primary education enrolment was inconsistent and, in places, statistically improbable.

The pattern that emerged across forestry, education, health, and agriculture was that budgetary intent often did not match budgetary reality. Schemes meant to support tribal agriculture would be under-funded or their allocations frozen in nominal terms, losing value to inflation each year. Forest-related schemes, crucial for a population that depends heavily on minor forest produce, would be tucked under departments with low absorption capacity. Health spending for tribal belts would lag behind the state average despite tribal areas having worse health indicators.

From data to democratic pressure 🔗

Raw analysis alone changes nothing. What distinguished DISHA was the second half of its work: taking findings out of spreadsheets and putting them into the hands of people who could use them. The organisation prepared short, readable briefs for MLAs, press releases for journalists, and Gujarati-language summaries for grassroots groups. Legislators who had no background in public finance could ask pointed questions in the assembly because DISHA had done the math for them.

Engaging the media and elected representatives 🔗

Newspapers in Gujarat began to carry DISHA’s sector-wise break-downs in the days following each budget. Television and regional press picked up specific findings, such as under-spending on tribal health or discrepancies in primary education data. MLAs who initially received summary budget information from DISHA began asking for further detail, turning the organisation into a standing resource for the opposition and, over time, for ruling-party members as well who wanted to defend or refine their own departments’ performance.

This created a new kind of accountability loop. When a minister knew that an independent organisation would publish a credible analysis within 24 hours of the budget speech, the political cost of quietly diluting tribal allocations went up. The budget stopped being purely an internal document of the political executive and started becoming, as one observer put it, a document reclaimed from political parties and administrators for the citizens, most of whom are poor.

The ripple effect on tribal-related sectors 🔗

Over successive budget cycles, the cumulative effect of DISHA’s advocacy showed up in the way certain allocations were framed and defended. Forest-dependent livelihoods received more specific line items. Funding for residential schools for ST students, eventually formalised through mechanisms such as the Eklavya Model Residential Schools, grew in both budget size and visibility. Agriculture and horticulture schemes for tribal belts began to appear with more concrete physical and financial targets. Health spending in predominantly tribal districts became a standard point of scrutiny in pre-budget debates.

This is not to suggest that DISHA single-handedly fixed tribal budgeting in Gujarat. Plenty of gaps remain, and audit reports continue to find irregularities. But the terms of the debate shifted. It became much harder for any government to claim robust tribal development spending without having the numbers stand up to scrutiny.

Broader lessons for civil society and policy-making 🔗

DISHA’s work has been documented by the International Budget Partnership as a pioneering example of how a civil society group can influence budget priorities and the transparency of the budget process. Globally, it has been held up alongside organisations like FUNDAR in Mexico as proof that non-state actors, armed with public finance literacy, can strengthen accountability without needing formal statutory powers. A broader review notes that DISHA’s 1995 analysis of the Gujarat state budget from the perspective of tribal welfare had a significant impact on state policies and strengthened government accountability.

What makes this model work 🔗

Several ingredients are worth noting for anyone studying civil society’s role in policy-making. First, technical credibility: DISHA invested early in building budget-analysis capacity, something that takes years and patient donor support. Second, speed and timing: releasing analysis within hours of the budget speech ensured that DISHA shaped the initial public narrative. Third, plurality of audiences: tailoring the same findings for MLAs, journalists, and village-level groups multiplied pressure from multiple directions. Fourth, constituency depth: being a membership-based organisation of tribal and forest workers meant DISHA’s advocacy had moral authority rooted in the communities it claimed to represent.

Relevance for today’s policy landscape 🔗

As state budgets become larger and more complex, and as welfare delivery increasingly depends on schemes with conditional allocations and matching grants, the need for independent budget analysis has grown rather than shrunk. Recent global policy reviews have pointed out that while the absolute quantum of funds under the Tribal Sub-Plan has grown more than four-fold over a decade, questions of targeting, outcomes, and absorption remain. Civil society organisations that can read a budget, translate it for citizens, and put credible numbers into public debate play a role that neither government nor markets can easily substitute.

For the tribal communities of Gujarat, the practical upshot of all this has been modest but meaningful. Budget documents are no longer entirely opaque. Allocations are more defensible because they are more debated. And a generation of activists, journalists, and elected representatives has grown up knowing that the budget is not just an accounting exercise but a political statement about whose lives the state chooses to prioritise.

What do you think? If a single organisation reading a state budget could shift the terms of tribal welfare debate in Gujarat, what might be possible if every district had its own budget-literate watchdog? And where do you see the biggest gap today between what governments promise tribal communities on paper and what actually reaches them?

References

1. https://tribal.gujarat.gov.in/tribal-area-sub-plan
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhusudan_Mistry
3. https://pria-digitallibrary.org/index.php?bid=7390&fid=6871&p=fstream-pdf
4. https://hrlibrary.umn.edu/edumat/IHRIP/ripple/app/appendixd.html
5. https://internationalbudget.org/wp-content/uploads/Report-from-a-National-Workshop-on-Budget-Analysis-and-Policy-Advocacy-in-India.pdf
6. https://tribal.gujarat.gov.in/budget-book
7. https://internationalbudget.org/publications/budget-analysis-and-social-activism-the-case-of-disha-in-gujarat-india/
8. https://www.eco-business.com/opinion/5-ways-civil-society-organisations-can-help-advance-the-sdgs/
9. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099060425063637099/pdf/P177653-1d3952eb-a413-4db8-b400-83b3c0a64fbf.pdf