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Fiscal Lens

An open data visualizer for Nepal's public finance — budgets, expenditure, and deficits, rendered as clean interactive charts.

SourceLive demo
Next.jsTypeScriptRechartsD3
Clean line and bar charts on a dark dashboard

Fiscal Lens is a side project born from frustration. Public finance data for Nepal exists, but it is locked in PDFs and tables that resist comparison. Fiscal Lens takes the same numbers and lets you see them.

What it shows

  • Revenue and expenditure over time, normalized to GDP.
  • Deficit composition — structural vs. cyclical, where estimable.
  • Sectoral allocation — where the money actually goes.

The hard part

The interesting engineering was never the charts. It was the data: reconciling inconsistent fiscal years, handling revisions (the same year's deficit gets restated three times), and deciding what "real" versus "nominal" means across a decade of inflation. The visualization is the easy ten percent; the data wrangling is the hard ninety.

normalize.ts
export function toReal(nominal: number, year: number, base = 2020): number {
  const deflator = DEFLATORS[year] / DEFLATORS[base];
  return nominal / deflator;
}

Why I keep it small

I deliberately resist feature creep. The moment a fiscal visualizer tries to be a forecasting tool, it stops being honest about what it is: a way to see what already happened. Predictions belong in a different tool, with different caveats.

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