PolicyDhara

Auto-updating tracker of Indian development policy across more than twenty sectors. It fetches from hundreds of government, regulator, think-tank and media sources concurrently every 6 hours via GitHub Actions, with a news filter and a policy-forward homepage.

Roadmap · Blog

A complement to impactmojo.in and the OpenStacks for Change ecosystem.

Live at policydhara.impactmojo.in

About

PolicyDhara (पॉलिसीधारा, "Policy Stream") is a searchable archive of Indian development policy. It aggregates policy documents, schemes, legislation, budget allocations and analysis from official government portals and research institutions, and refreshes automatically every 6 hours.

It is designed for researchers, journalists, advocates and practitioners who need to track policy developments across India's governance system without monitoring dozens of government portals by hand.

What it tracks

• Central and state government policies, schemes, and legislation
• Union Budget allocations and fiscal policy statements
• Parliament bills, session data, and legislative productivity
• Notifications, gazette circulars, and executive orders
• Think tank analysis and international development body reports

Sectors covered

Data sources

The pipeline fetches from every source listed in feeds.json concurrently. A few high-value ones:

Architecture

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│              GitHub Actions (every 6 hours)           │
│                                                        │
│  update-policies.yml                                   │
│  ├── Fetch all sources concurrently (RSS/API/scrape)  │
│  ├── Filter news noise + cap media at 40%             │
│  ├── Classify by sector and document type             │
│  ├── Deduplicate and detect amendments                │
│  ├── Commit updated data to repository                │
│  └── Trigger GitHub Pages rebuild                     │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
                         │
              GitHub Pages (static hosting)
                         │
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│               policydhara.impactmojo.in               │
│  ├── Searchable policy database                       │
│  ├── Sector filters (22 categories)                   │
│  ├── Source attribution for every entry               │
│  └── Email digest for subscribers                     │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Automation schedule

Optional integrations

Both run as best-effort steps in update-policies.yml and skip silently if the relevant secrets are not set.

For the Buttondown newsletter, set BUTTONDOWN_API_KEY as a GitHub Secret.

For Telegram alerts on high-priority new policies, set:

• TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN: from @BotFather (/newbot)
• TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID: the channel @username (e.g. @policydhara) or a numeric chat id

Add the bot as an administrator on the channel with "Post Messages" permission. Test locally with python3 scripts/push_telegram.py --dry-run.

Local development

git clone https://github.com/Varnasr/PolicyDhara.git
cd PolicyDhara

# Python pipeline
pip install -r scripts/requirements.txt
python3 scripts/fetch_all.py            # fetch + filter + classify
python3 scripts/check_source_health.py  # bucket every source (WORKS/REDUNDANT/SHELL/DEAD)

# Astro site
npm install
npm run dev      # local dev server
npm run build    # production build (Astro + Pagefind)

# Run the test suite
python3 -m pytest tests/

Tech stack

Related repositories

• ImpactMojo: main platform (PolicyDhara is embedded)
• PolicyStack: OpenStacks policy data layer
• INDIA-DATA: Bihar electoral data analysis
• someperspective: India's political economy analysis

License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

Contact

• Platform: impactmojo.in
• GitHub: github.com/Varnasr