This work has three major aims. The first aim is of a technical kind, and the second and third aims are broader, historical ones.

The technical objective was to place the analysis of Indian public expenditure on a sounder and more informative statistical base than that on which it has hitherto rested. For a number of reasons which are explained in some detail in Chapter 3 the national accounts classification of public expenditure is, when its advantages and disadvantages are balanced out, more useful for macroeconomic analysis than any existing scheme for ordering public expenditure data. At the time when this task was begun, in the early 1960s, the analysis of Indian public expenditure was caught in a pincer attack, between those who seemed quite ignorant of the national accounts method of expenditure analysis, and those who, following Professor Myrdal, were convinced that national accounts categories could have no meaning in the economic circumstances of contemporary India.

The original plan for this work was that it should document as fully as possible all public expenditure data in India that had been reclassified on a national accounts basis, in order to build up continuous and fully reconciled timeseries data for the central and state governments and, if possible, for local authorities. This was to have been done with a critical commentary on the nature and limitations of this kind of data.