Why it is published
This ledger is published in the public interest, so that any citizen can see how public office was exercised in India this century, what it cost in money and in lives, and whether anybody was ever made to answer for it. That is the whole purpose. Nothing here is published for entertainment, for a party, or for money.
It is a matter of public interest how public power is used, because the power was lent by the public and paid for by them. A citizen asking what happened to their money, their air, their railway bridge or their exam paper is not a nuisance to be managed. In a democracy that question is the job. A government confident in its record has nothing to fear from a document that cites its own audits back to it.
Public conduct only
This ledger records the public conduct of people who held public office, in the exercise of that office. It does not record, and will not accept, anything about anyone's private life, family, health, faith, finances outside public office, or personal relationships. Submissions of that kind are deleted rather than reviewed.
Naming who held a portfolio when a failure happened is a matter of record. It is not, by itself, an allegation of personal wrongdoing, and this site says so on every page where it appears. The ministers dashboard totals costs and deaths recorded in the cases under a portfolio, and never attributes those figures to an individual as a personal act.
What this does not claim
- It does not call anyone a criminal. Where no court has found guilt, none is asserted. Where a court has cleared someone, this ledger says so in the same breath as the allegation.
- It does not present allegation as fact. Verdicts, audits, government admissions and documented tolls are stated as fact. Anything contested sits in a marked field, attributed to the reporting, the opposition or the court process that raised it.
- It does not present estimates as accounts. Every estimated figure is tagged, most are disputed ranges, and the headline totals are a scale rather than a balance sheet. They are not a claim that every rupee was stolen.
- It does not claim to be complete. Eighty-four cases is a catalogue, not a census. Cases that cannot be sourced are held back by the build and never published, however well known they are.
- It does not belong to a party. The scope runs from 2000 across every government of the period, national and state, and the test applied is identical in each: was anyone made to answer?
How claims are sourced
Every published case carries at least one link a reader can open and check. That is enforced by the build rather than by good intentions. Each source is tiered so a reader can weigh it without taking anyone's word for it:
- T1 Primary record. Court judgments, CAG audits, the gazette, statute, official government or regulator publications, parliamentary records, official statistics, peer-reviewed research.
- T2 Independent reporting and documented research. Established news organisations, and rights or research bodies that publish their method and their evidence.
- T3 Partisan, advocacy, aggregated or user-edited. Useful as a pointer, never as proof, and never the only source on a case.
The honest state of the evidence, today: of 194 sources on this ledger, 23 are primary records. Sixty-six of the eighty-four cases rest on reporting alone. That is the weakest flank of this project and it is printed here rather than hidden, because a ledger that overstates its own evidence has no business asking anyone else for accuracy. Closing that gap is what the Right to Information desk is for.
Right of reply, corrections and removal
Anyone named on this ledger, or acting for them, has a standing right of reply. A reply that is on the record and signed will be published alongside the case, in full, without editing for tone. That offer does not expire and does not require a lawyer.
Factual corrections are acted on. If a source is wrong, misread, superseded by a later judgment, or no longer supports what was built on it, the case is corrected or withdrawn and the change is recorded. Point to the record and it will be fixed faster than any notice could achieve.
Corrections and right of reply Download the whole ledger
Who this belongs to
Not to whoever built it. A ledger that depends on one person's attention is a ledger with a single point of failure, and any institution that wanted it gone would only have to wait. So the record is open: every case is downloadable as CSV or JSON, every case has a permanent citable page, and anyone may submit a case with sources and dates.
Nothing publishes itself. A submission enters a review queue and is checked against these rules before it appears — sources opened, tier assigned, fact separated from allegation. The intention is for that review to be carried out by a group of contributors rather than by one editor, and for the standard applied to be the one written on this page, where anybody can hold it up against the result.