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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | People as auditors -Nikhil Dey and Aruna Roy

People as auditors -Nikhil Dey and Aruna Roy

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published Published on May 12, 2018   modified Modified on May 12, 2018
-The Hindu

Social audits ensure a citizen-centric mode of accountability

The breakdown of institutions has underlined the fact that democracy — and especially public funds — need eternal public vigilance. But in India, the elites close ranks to neutralise voices of dissent and alarm, thus preventing public vigilance.

Democratic governance needs the citizen to be legally empowered to ask questions, file complaints, and be a part of the corrective process. Social audits, as they have begun to evolve in India, can potentially become a powerful democratic method by which transparency can be combined with an institutionalised form of accountability to the people.

In the mid-1990s, the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) experimented with, and began to conceptualise, village-based Jan Sunwais (public hearings) on development expenditure. These helped establish the Right to Information (RTI) as a potent, usable people’s issue and, in parallel, the institutionalised form of social audits.

Information is empowering

In a Jan Sunwai campaign, organised in five different development blocks of central Rajasthan, people learnt by doing. They realised that information is at the core of their empowerment. The process of verification, inquiry and auditing of records was demystified. 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. Information about payments made to dead people and non-workers propelled residents to testify in the Jan Sunwai. These included serving government and armed forces personnel and names randomly copied in serial order from electoral lists. Even animals absurdly enough found their way into the lists of workers. Unfinished buildings without doors, windows or a roof were shown as audited and ‘complete’. Ghost names and ghost works were exposed. Fake development works paid for and ‘completed’ on paper enraged local residents.

The people made four sharply focussed demands and circulated them in a pamphlet: full and open access to records of development expenditure; the presence and accountability of officials who are responsible to answer people’s questions; the immediate redress of grievances, including the return of defalcated money to its intended purpose; and mandatory ‘social audits’ .

Amitabh Mukhopadhyaya, then an officer of the IA&AS, who visited, watched and contributed to the architectural growth of the process till he passed away a year ago, remarked that this was “audit returning to its roots”: the word audit comes from the Latin word audiere, which means “to hear”. The Jan Sunwai facilitated the reading of information and recorded the people’s response. The effective institutionalisation of this platform could be a fundamental breakthrough in the attempt to give people and communities real monitoring powers. One of the defining slogans of the RTI movement that emerged from these Jan Sunwais and people’s agitations — “hamaara paisa, hamaara hisab” (our money, our accounts) — succinctly encapsulated the concept of a social audit.

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The Hindu, 30 April, 2018, http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/people-as-auditors/article23721429.ece


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