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the data.
A ledger nobody can cite in bulk is an argument rather than a record. Everything on this site is here as two files, under a licence that lets you republish it, chart it, check it or argue with it. If you find an error in the data, that is a correction we want.
Licence
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Republish it, chart it, load it into a paper, build something else on it. The only condition is attribution: credit the Citizens' Accountability Ledger and link to https://whoisresponsible.xyz so a reader can check the record for themselves.
The sources are not ours to license. Each citation points at the publisher who holds it, and their terms are theirs.
What you are getting, and what you are not
- 194 sources across 84 cases, of which 23 are tier-1 primary records. 18 cases carry at least one primary citation; the remaining 66 rest on reporting alone.
primary_source_counttells you which is which, per row, and you should check it before you quote one. - Estimates are estimates. Cost and death figures are order-of-magnitude, often disputed ranges, and absent on most rows. An empty cell means unmeasured, never zero.
- Naming an office-holder is a record of who held the portfolio, not a finding of personal guilt. Several people named here were later cleared, and the case text says so.
- Three cases are held back as unsourced drafts and are not in these files.
Field definitions
| Field | What it means |
|---|---|
id | Permanent identifier. Also the URL: /case/<id>/. Never reused, never renumbered. |
display_no | Chronological position, oldest = 1. Derived at build time, so it changes when a case is inserted. Cite the id, not this. |
date_text | The date as the record states it, which is sometimes a range or a report date rather than a day. |
sort_key | YYYYMMDD integer used for ordering. Where only a month or year is known, the day is set to 01. |
severity | red = no accountability recorded. amber = partial, reversed, contested or unresolved. |
cost_inr_crore_estimate | Crore rupees, and an estimate. Present on 28 of 84 cases; absent means unmeasured, not zero. |
deaths_estimate | Present on 25 of 84 cases. Same caveat: absent means unmeasured. |
primary_source_count | Tier-1 citations: court, audit, gazette or official publication. This is the number to check before quoting a case. |
departures | Office-holders who actually left over the case, with level (union / state / official) and party at the time. |
Cite the id, never the display_no. The id is frozen for the life of the case; the display number shifts whenever an older case is added.