methodology
About LobbyWatch
LobbyWatch is the third layer of India's financial-policy sousveillance stack. Surveillance is watching citizens; sousveillance is citizens watching back. Room one (rule-writers) is watched by RegTrac; room two (rule-borrowers) by SROTrac; this register watches room three — the rule-buyers.
Ground rules
- Public data first — statutes, gazettes, published comments, regulator websites, press of record.
- Every claim sourced per row — with dates. If a figure has no source, it stays out.
- "As of" stamped everywhere — corrections are visible, never silent.
- Consumer payoff required — every page answers "why should the person paying care".
- No insinuation without a paper trail — access and influence are documented through meetings, minutes, comment letters and appointment orders, not vibes.
What is in the register today
The roadmap (build order from SOUSVEILLANCE.md)
- Done — consultation ledger. Cross-regulator ledger with the comments-published fact (this release).
- Done — interests register. Industry bodies, think tanks, foreign lobbies, consumer side (this release).
- Done — revolving-door ledger. Sourced post-office appointments (this release).
- Done — RTI playbook. Ready-to-file templates + filing log (this release).
- Next — consultation-index scrapers. Automated refresh of RBI/SEBI/IRDAI/PFRDA/IBBI/IFSCA consultation indexes (formats vary wildly).
- Next — comments corpus. Download published comments at scale; file RTIs for the unpublished ones.
- Then — the diff engine. Draft clause → final clause → which commenter's language appears in the rule.
How the layers join
RegTrac ↔ LobbyWatch
Appointment authorities (Appointments Committee of the Cabinet; Financial Sector Regulatory Appointments Search Committee) are RegTrac rows. The revolving door lands people from this layer into room one.
SROTrac ↔ LobbyWatch
SRO members are the same institutions that flood consultation processes. A rule that survives consultation unchanged toward industry comments is a LobbyWatch finding; the membership that wanted it is a SROTrac fact.
Data & code
Everything is CSV-first in the open repo (GitHub); HTML is generated from the CSVs. Data licensed CC BY 4.0 (attribute "LobbyWatch / CashlessConsumer"); code MIT. Agent entry point: llms.txt.