About this dataset — provenance & method
The List of Major and Minor Heads of Account (LMMHA) is the master classification the Controller General of Accounts (CGA), Department of Expenditure, Ministry of Finance, maintains for the Union and the States. It is the framework under which every receipt and every item of expenditure in government accounts is recorded. The live, authoritative version is the one CGA publishes on its website, current to 2026.
Lineage
The LMMHA was first issued in 1987 (first edition). That original survives only as a historical copy held in the Parliament Library. Successive editions consolidated the accumulated correction slips. The third edition (2001) is the base we use here, because it is the earliest consolidated list we could obtain in a form we could parse completely.
What we did
We parsed the 2001 third-edition base into a structured, code-keyed dataset of 5,768 heads — preserving the full Major → Sub-Major → Minor hierarchy and the scope notes attached to each head. We then layered the CGA's correction slips — the official instruments that add, rename or delete heads — on top of that base to track how the classification changes over time. The aim is a single, auditable trail from the 2001 base forward to the live 2026 list.
Coverage and limits — please read
The correction-slip trail we have reconstructed so far runs 2012 to 2026. The periods 1987–2001 and 2001–2012 are not yet reconstructed: the 1987 first edition and the intermediate correction record exist only as printed material we have not yet digitised. So this site is best read as a verified 2001 base plus the 2012-onward correction history — converging toward, but not yet a complete back-calculation to, the live 2026 CGA list.
Correction-slip numbers shown here are the government's own slip numbers; internal CGA file or PDF identifiers are deliberately not presented as slip numbers.
The "observed reporting" layer
Where you see actual budgeted amounts under a head (for example, Assam's spending on public libraries), that is a separate evidence layer: how one government actually used a code, distinct from the normative list. Those figures are currently single-source and illustrative (CivicDataLab / openbudgetsindia) and are not yet cross-checked against RBI State Finances or the state budget volumes. Treat them as indicative, not citable, until verified.
Status
This is public-interest fiscal-transparency infrastructure, in progress. Always verify against the CGA's published LMMHA before citing a head or a figure.
A note on why this had to be built from the outside. Maintaining the LMMHA as a public, version-controlled, machine-readable document — every correction slip dated, numbered and diffable — is neither difficult nor novel. It is ordinary data hygiene, and it sits squarely inside the State's own transparency and RTI obligations: a citizen cannot follow the money if the very categories the money is sorted into are not themselves legible.
The Union and the States employ some of the most selectively recruited administrators in the world to run exactly this machinery. That turning the chart of accounts into something an ordinary person can read and trace has instead been left to volunteers reconstructing it slip by slip — from a 2001 print edition and a Parliament-library copy of the 1987 original — rather than simply published this way by the offices that issue the slips, is its own small lesson in which kinds of legibility the apparatus chooses to maintain, and which it does not.