[Answered] What do you understand by the term Social Audit? Discuss the importance of social audit in India.

A social audit is a way of measuring, reporting and improving an organisation’s performance holding it socially accountable. Social audit helps to increase efficiency and effectiveness of an organisation. It not only increase accountability and transparency but lead to good governance.

Importance of social audit in India:

1. Improve governance: Social auditing impact governance leading to good governance. It make government responsible to its citizen allowing better governance through citizen’s participation.
2. Accountability and transparency: It allows the voice of stakeholders, including marginalised/poor groups being heard by the authorities. Social auditing enhance local governance, and strengthen accountability and transparency in local bodies.
3. Social impact: The social audit focuses on the neglected issue of society including environment and economic issues and efficiency of a project or programme. This allow better implementation of policies and remove various social inefficiencies.
4. Create awareness: It creates awareness among beneficiaries and providers social and productive services. It enable the community to participate in local planning.
5. Enhance development: It help in assessing the physical and financial gaps between needs and resources available for local development. Therefore it help in increasing efficacy and effectiveness of local development programmes.
6. Strengthen democracy: Social Audit makes it sure that in democracy, the powers of decision makers should be used as far as possible with the consent and understanding of all concerned. It encourages local democracy and encourages community participation. It promote collective decision making and sharing of responsibilities.
7. Reduces corruption: It uncovers irregularities and malpractices in the public sector and maintains oversight on government functioning, thus reducing leakages and corruption.
8. Monitoring and feedback: It monitors social and ethical impact of an organisation’s performance and provides feedback on the work.
9. Generates demand: Social Audit serves as the basis for framing the management’s policies by raising demands in a socially responsible and accountable manner by highlighting the real problems.
10. Save government resources: It save government resources by reducing expenditures on auditing the policy implications and effectiveness. It also reduce corruption, thereby saving public money.

Thus social audit is a tool of social empowerment especially of most vulnerable groups in the society. It helps in distributing benefits of economic growth to all. Further it allow accountability of government to its people and allow better policy formulation and implementation.