How Beacon works

01 · THE IDEAWhat Beacon is

Governments run on public money, but the paper trail is scattered across portals most people never open. Beacon pulls that trail into two things anyone can read in a minute: a report card for your Lok Sabha MP and a live ticket board of infrastructure projects — each project shown like an open ticket: how long it has run, how late it is, what it costs now.

Beacon states what the records say and cites where each number came from. It never tells you what to conclude.

02 · SOURCESWhere the numbers come from

• MP local-area funds (MPLADS) — allocation and utilisation from the Ministry of Statistics' MPLADS records, via the Empowered Indian dataset.
• Parliament activity — attendance, questions and debates from PRS Legislative Research's MP track record data.
• Your constituency — India Post's pincode directory mapped onto Election Commission Lok Sabha boundaries.
• Project tickets — the Government of India's own monthly flash report on central-sector infrastructure projects of ₹150 crore and above (MoSPI / PAIMANA portal): sanctioned cost, revised cost, original and anticipated completion dates, spend to date.

Every ticket and card links back to its source. If a record is missing — some MPs have incomplete data — the card says so instead of guessing.

03 · TWO TIERSOfficial and reported tickets

OFFICIAL · MoSPI  Straight from the government's flash report. These are central projects; the numbers are the government's own.

REPORTED · PRESS-SOURCED  State and city projects (flyovers, metros, roads) that never appear in the central report. A research agent finds these in press coverage, cross-checks them against multiple named publications, and adds them with a dashed border so you always know the difference. Their numbers are as reported by the press, not certified by government.

04 · THE AIHow the AI is constrained

Beacon's agent cannot make things up about the records. Deterministic tools fetch the data; the AI (Google's Gemini) reasons only over what those tools return, and every answer shows its tool trace and sources.

Each ticket also gets an automatic truth check: the AI searches live public reporting for the project and compares it against the official record. Results carry a level — CLEAR WATCH ATTENTION — with citations you can open yourself.

A framing guard blocks charged or accusatory language. Red flags on tickets are either arithmetic (cost doubled, years past deadline, spend exceeding the original budget) or quoted from named reporting — never the AI's opinion.

05 · YOUR VOICEVotes on tickets

You can vote keep / review / stop on any ticket. Votes are anonymous, one per device per ticket, and only aggregate counts are stored. They are a public pulse, not a petition — Beacon does not claim they represent anyone but the people who pressed the button.

06 · PRIVACYWhat we know about you

No accounts, no sign-in, no personal data. Usage analytics are first-party and self-hosted: a random identifier in your browser, event names like "page view" or "share", and nothing else. No third-party trackers, no ad networks, no data sold or shared.

07 · HONESTYLimits and corrections

The flash report lags by a month or two; press-sourced numbers can be stale or disputed; utilisation figures are term-to-date, not final. Where data is uncertain, Beacon says "as reported" and shows the date it was checked.

If a number on Beacon is wrong, the fastest fix is at the source — the MoSPI/PAIMANA portal for official tickets, the cited publication for reported ones. Beacon re-checks automatically.