Centre may seek social audit of most schemes

Move aimed at bringing accountability and transparency

The Central government may expand the ambit of social audit to cover all schemes across ministries to assess their ground impact on final beneficiaries and address grievances.

Currently social audit is done for MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), rural housing scheme and also for funds allocated through the 14th Finance Commission.

Officials said the plan now is to conduct social audits of other programmes and schemes run by different ministries to bring a sense of accountability and transparency to them.

Of late, around 5,000-6,000 district and block-level resource persons along with 60,000 women Self-Help Groups (SHGs) have also been trained through a specially designed certificate course to conduct social audits.

Almost all states have set up their own Directorates of Social Audits which along with the available resource persons could be involved for conducting social audits of other government schemes as well after tweaking their training modules.

In social audit, citizens themselves assess the impact of government schemes and programmes by comparing official records with actual ground situation.

However, civil society activists and experts said that unless social audits are supplemented through effective

implementation of Right to Information (RTI) Act the entire exercise is mere “window dressing”.

“The real protection from corruption in government programmes and policies will come from proper implementation of the RTI Act. That, however, has suffered tremendously in the past two-three years. Extending social audits to other programmes while weakening the RTI is like breaking the legs and then offering crutches,” Reetika Khera, associate professor, IIMAhmedabad, told Business Standard.

Officials said social audits of MGNREGA have not been done in a structured manner since its inception more than a decade back, though these were mandatory as per the Act.

However, in the last five-six years, social audits have got a fresh impetus after the Centre notified a structured auditing standard in cooperation with Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) and directed states to set up their own Directorates of Social Audits.

So far almost all states except Rajasthan and Haryana have their own Directorates of Social Audits.

The government along with Tata Institute of Social Sciences and National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj, Hyderabad, has also developed a shortterm certificate course on social audits for district and block resource persons and SHGs.

So far 60,000 women from SHGs and 5,000-6,000 resource persons have been trained to do social audit of MGNREGA under the same.

Funds are separately allocated from MGNREGA for social audits.