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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Community-led social audit by Amita Sharma

Community-led social audit by Amita Sharma

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published Published on Dec 30, 2010   modified Modified on Dec 30, 2010

Between the technical rigour and finality of CAG audit and people's airing of grievances, a new audit system that subscribes to, and strengthens, open government may be waiting to be born.

The new system is envisaged as one where the CAG’s formal audit includes the relatively new concept of community-led social audit . The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Guarantee Act, 2005 (MGNREGA) presents an opportunity to do this.

Traditionally, auditing is a vital part of accounting wherein government examines areas internal to its own agencies. Social audit reverses this upward accountability with one that is an outward where the community examines the government’s action, its impact on its lives, and whether official records reflect the situation on the ground.

It would appear that social audit and CAG are at two ends of an audit spectrum. However, the transiting of select welfare plans into a rights-based Act challenges the conventional grammar of account-based audits that looks mainly at expenditure, conformity to rules and classificatory heads.

This is necessary but not sufficient when dealing with a rightsbased Act that raises questions not just about accounts, but about accountability and determines these issues through public scrutiny so that the process of audit has the same transparency as is expected of the implementation systems.

When laws are for the very poor, for whom time is critical since the work to be given in 15 days and wages paid in 15 days serve as the lifeline to stay off debt and starvation, then will a post-event indictment do?

In a rights-based law, not only outcomes but the processes of exercise of rights are central concerns as they determine the nature of outcomes and determine accountability for decisions taken.

Legal rights are vested in individuals. A sample check of some individual’s records cannot safeguard or verify the rights of other individuals, nor can the findings of a sample be generalised or applied to other individuals. The only way the exercise of rights and the implementation of corresponding legal guarantees can be regularly and universally scrutinised is through a system that audits processes concurrently at their level of incidence.

The CAG audit, in its conventional form, cannot do this. Such an audit is possible only by the local community that is most equipped with to assess because it has the most powerful tool for such interrogation — local knowledge and historical memory which defy the best government records.

To give legal authority to the local community , MGNREGA provides for social audit by the gram sabha under Section 17. The gram sabha is the structure through which the local community governs itself. But does it actually acquire agency, despite being legally vested with powers?

The local community is heterogeneous and stratified, with multiple inequalities, deeply entrenched legacies of asymmetrical power structures generating shifting interests, alliances and conflicts. In reality, the gram sabha signifies only a geographical collectivity, and not a community of shared concerns or agenda.

Its functions and powers are determined by Panchayati Raj Acts of state governments which, in most cases, make the sarpanch the chairperson of the gram sabha with the power to convene it. It is unlikely that a sarpanch will convene a gram sahba that will scrutinise and interrogate and fix responsibility for things not right.

THE CAG audit, independent as it is, does not reach out either vertically or laterally to accomplish the pervasive selfcritical appraisal that a social audit can. This audit impasse can be overcome by evolving a process that melds the local, participatory character of social audit and the rigour and authority of the CAG audit.

The MGNREGA offers an opening for this through its Section 24(1) that directs the government of India to formulate appropriate audit arrangements for accounts in consultation with the CAG. This provision, read with section 17, enables combining the two audit forms — CAG and social audit.

The CAG audit should go beyond records to become a living audit where people’s voices construct and critique records. The CAG should regard the community as its auditor. The poor have the knowledge and intuitive ability to check out information concerning their work, but are thwarted from doing so by hierarchical dependencies. What is needed is facilitation and some training for them to acquire the confidence to interrogate with authority.

This can be done by setting up a social audit wing in CAG offices , thus structurally blending social audit with other audit forms. The CAG can formulate audit rules including social audits with local community persons trained for this purpose. It could begin this exercise with flagship programmes like the MGNREGA, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, National Rural Health Mission, and the proposed Food Security Act.

This community-basing of audit will demystify its procedures to the common man for whom government schemes are intended. Interlocking with people’s experience and narratives will transport audit from its remote location in government offices to embed it in community life.

Audit will then critique not just the quality of the use of money, but the quality of decision-making , and whether it promotes equity and distributive justice, becoming an audit of the ethics of governance , not just its economics, and by empowering the poor.

Concurrent community audits of implementation processes will make audit a way of doing as a self-reflexive process of choice, action, evaluation, reform and self-correction , not just fault finding. It will give agency to the gram sabha as people’s parliament, dissolving dichotomies between implementers and auditors, aiming at the highest dialectical synthesis of self-governance .

The MGNREGA provides space to initiate this significant reform now in the midst of its contestations instead of deferring to more utopian times.

This will make a technically rigorous audit communitybased , enforcing lateral accountability of delivery systems to people whose interests are at stake. One advantage in such a system being formulated by the CAG is that it will be free of particular schemes and Acts and will have institutional authority independent of arrangements influenced by implementation agencies or any other expedient considerations of the Centre or the state.

(The author works with the government. Views are personal.)


The Economic Times, 30 December, 2010, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/7188376.cms


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