In 2009, Accountability Initiative (AI) partnered with the ASER Centre to roll out India’s first national citizen-led public expenditure tracking survey called PAISA. The survey focused on tracking government funds for elementary education.

Since 2009, AI has conducted six national PAISA surveys in partnership with ASER as well as three rounds of in-depth district focused expenditure tracking studies across five states in India. More recently, AI has expanded the PAISA methodology to other key social sector programmes including health, nutrition, sanitation and local government financing. Through the PAISA surveys, AI has consistently highlighted the strengths and limitations of India’s public finance management system. In particular, the PAISA surveys point to the consequences of India’s opaque and broken public finance management on effective implementation of social sector programmes and community participation at the grassroots.

An important objective of the PAISA survey is to engage citizens in the processes of governance. This video (above) is a small effort in this direction. It provides a step by step guide on how to conduct PAISA surveys. We hope that this video will motivate you to come out and ask your government where and how it spends its money.

To learn more about PAISA Studies, click here.

To stay engaged with our on-going work on fund tracking for social sector programmes, follow us on Twitter (@AccInitiative) and Facebook (accountabilityindia).