List of Major & Minor Heads of Account

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.

We publish this as a small public-interest layer in a larger transparency effort: so readers can see how official account codes change over time, and can ask whether States are reporting comparable subjects under consistent heads. This site is meant to make the classification layer easier to inspect and reuse; it does not replace the CGA list, state budget volumes, RBI State Finances, CAG reports, or the broader fiscal-transparency work already being done by public-data groups, journalists, researchers and civic technologists.

Lineage

The LMMHA was first issued in 1987 (first edition). That original survives as a historical copy held in the Sansad 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.

1987 archival find — what changed, and why it matters

The first LMMHA edition is preserved in the Sansad Library as List of Major and Minor Heads of Account of Union and States 1987. It was issued by the Ministry of Finance, Department of Expenditure, through the Controller General of Accounts. The public catalogue record is available here: Sansad Library record for the 1987 LMMHA.

The 1987 edition explains why the accounting code had to change. Since 1 April 1974, government accounts had been organised on a function-cum-programme basis, so spending could be read by function, programme and scheme. Over time, the official Plan programmes and the account heads had drifted apart. The result was a basic transparency problem: budgets could name programmes, but the accounts did not always make those programmes easy to trace consistently.

A committee with the Controller General of Accounts, Budget Division, Planning Commission and Comptroller and Auditor General reviewed the old heads and rationalised them. The new classification took effect from 1 April 1987. Major Head codes moved from three digits to four digits, new sub-sectors were introduced, and heads up to Minor Head level were given numeric codes for computer-based financial reporting.

The constitutional basis is Article 150: Union and State accounts must be kept in the form prescribed on the advice of the Comptroller and Auditor General. That is why the LMMHA matters. Legislatures can vote grants, approve appropriations and examine audit only when public money is sorted into stable, public categories.

1. Archival source: Sansad Library, List of Major and Minor Heads of Account of Union and States 1987, item UUID 65ffdef0-8e5a-4f58-b811-39f0d74f8e6e; original PDF bitstream UUID 7e058dde-7c78-442c-b132-5c853de638a1.
2. Local copy check: the saved PDF is 88,944,846 bytes and matches the Parliament Library file's MD5 21b6ed7bf7712b6f4b78bb3f2cbcb4a0; local PDF tools report 480 pages.
3. Primary text checked: 1987 LMMHA preface, especially the 1974 functional-classification background, 1 April 1987 effective date, four-digit Major Head change, and Article 150 issuance note.

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.

Constitutional finance — why the chart matters

The LMMHA is not just a technical glossary. It is the chart-of-accounts layer underneath the Constitution's public-finance machinery. Articles 112 and 113 require the Union's annual financial statement and demands for grants to be placed before Parliament; Article 114 requires appropriation before money is drawn from the Consolidated Fund of India; Articles 266 and 267 distinguish the Consolidated Fund, the Public Account and the Contingency Fund; Articles 148–151 put audit in the Comptroller and Auditor General; and Articles 268–281, including Article 280 on the Finance Commission, govern the distribution of revenues between the Union and the States.

In Ambedkar's own public-finance writing, constitutional government depends on matching administrative responsibility with finance. In The Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India, he wrote that the Government of India had to give, and the Provinces had to receive, so that provincial self-government could live (BAWS Vol. 6, p. 254). As chair of the Drafting Committee, he helped place revenue distribution and the Finance Commission inside the constitutional design rather than leaving them to executive grace (BAWS Vol. 13, Draft Constitution material; see also the Constituent Assembly debates of 4 November 1948).

That is why this site treats classification as constitutional infrastructure. The Constitution says where public money may sit, how it may move, who must vote it, who audits it, and how Union-State revenue disputes are periodically reviewed. The LMMHA supplies the public vocabulary through which those movements become searchable, comparable and contestable. Ambedkar's warning about constitutional morality applies here: formal rules are not enough if the administrative categories through which money is booked are opaque, stale, or impossible for citizens to trace.

1. Current constitutional text: Legislative Department, Government of India, Constitution of India, especially Parts V and XII.
2. Ambedkar on fiscal federalism: B. R. Ambedkar, The Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India, BAWS Vol. 6, p. 254.
3. Ambedkar and constitutional morality / Draft Constitution framing: Constituent Assembly Debates, 4 November 1948; BAWS Vol. 13.

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.