Navigation Guide

Here's an introduction of how this guidebook is structured and how you can get to what's important for you.

What do we mean by civic participation in the state budget?

Go here to get a quick overview of participatory budgeting, a glimpse of what has been attempted in Assam in the previous financial years and what we've kept in mind as we attempt to design of the future of civic participation in the state budget as part of our ongoing research and collaboration with the Finance Department, Government of Assam.

Never heard of Service Design or Service Blueprints?

Service Blueprints are an integral part of visualising new product-service systems. Head over to the section on Service Design to get an overview on the important concepts and how they have been used in this project.

S1: How might we improve the quality and diversity of proposals and suggestions of domain experts in the state budget?

In S1: Budget for X we explore an iteration of the Budget4Justice Campaign, a joint collaboration between Agami and CivicDataLab which facilitated organisations in the law and justice sector to come up with detailed suggestions and proposals for the Assam Budget 2020-21. Carrying on learnings from the format, S1 Budget for X shows how such a campaign can be conducted for any of the major domains of concern like education, healthcare, forests and wildlife, natural resource management and so on.

S2: How might we improve the grassroots engagement of citizens in a ward and increase their share of voice in the state budget decisions with youth as facilitators?

In S2: Budget Fellowship we take learnings from the workshop with NSS volunteers at Tezpur University and the online social media campaign targeting youth of Assam and propose a fellowship model which involves training a cohort of fellows from Universities based in Assam, partnering with local MLAs and running an on-ground campaign with the help of these fellows to enable citizens to deliberate over issues that matter to them and come up with detailed budget proposals that can be considered by the State Government.