People as auditors

People as auditors

Context

Social audits ensure a citizen-centric mode of accountability

Democracy needs eternal public vigilance

Democratic governance needs the citizen to be legally empowered to ask questions, file complaints, and be a part of the corrective process

Jan Sunwais: a type of social audit experiment in the mid-1990s

• In the mid-1990s, the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) experimented with village-based Jan Sunwais (public hearings) on development expenditure
• In a Jan Sunwai campaign, organised in five different development blocks of central Rajasthan, people learnt by doing
• Public readings of informally accessed development records had dramatic outcomes
• As the names were read out from government labour lists, the responses were immediate and galvanised the people

Effects of Jan Sunwais

• The Jan Sunwai facilitated the reading of information and recorded the people’s response.
• Many scams, ghost names, ghost works, fake developmental works, fake payments to dead people etc. were uncovered

Only RTI not enough; Social audit is needed

• The RTI Act brought into effect the first prerequisite for social audits — giving citizens access to government records
• The last 13 years of its use have demonstrated its salutary effect, but also made it obvious that information itself is not enough without any redressal mechanism
• The social audit places accountability in the centre of its frame, and transfers the power of scrutiny and validation to the people: a citizen-centric mode of accountability.

What is social audit?

• This means “audit returning to its roots”: the word audit comes from the Latin word audiere, which means “to hear”
• Information is to be proactively shared amongst people so that they can “ performance audit” a service or programme, from planning, to implementation and evaluation.

What needs to be done?

• An independent facilitation structure needs to be set up, fleshed out, legally empowered and mandated to ensure that social audits are conducted
• The relationship between the powerful and the powerless has to shift from patronage to rights, and from inequality to equality, making the right to question inalienable
• Specific methods of sharing information, recording comments and acting on findings have been worked out. They now need to be acted upon

Examples of social audits currently

MGNREGA

• The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was the first law to mandate social audit as a statutory requirement
• Faced opposition in Rajasthan; was duly implemented in undivided Andhra Pradesh which reaped its benefits later

Institutionalised social audits

• Nationally, institutionalised social audits have begun to make real progress only recently, with the interest and support of the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), and the orders of the Supreme Court
• Meghalaya: first State to pass and roll out a social audit law

In what was a social audit breakthrough in 2017, Meghalaya became the first State to pass and roll out a social audit law to cover all departments.

What has been done?

Social audit standards developed by CAG:

• The Office of the CAG developed social audit rules for the MGNREGA in 2011, conducted a performance audit in 2015, and finally a year later formulated social audit standards in consultation with the Ministry of Rural Development — the first time in the world

State Social audit units:

• The Supreme Court has recently passed a series of orders to give social audits the robust infrastructural framework they need.
• Citing the statutory requirements in the MGNREGA and the National Food Security Act, the court has ordered that the CAG-formulated Social Audit Standards be applied to set up truly independent state-supported State Social Audit units

Conclusion

The system of social audits needs synergetic endorsement and a push by multiple authorities to establish an institutionalised framework which cannot be undermined by any vested interests. It is now an opportune time for citizens groups to campaign to strengthen social audits, and make real progress in holding the political executive and implementing agencies to account.