Centre may expand social audit to most govt schemes to assess ground impact

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

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

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

At present, such social audit is done for MGNREGA, rural housing programmes, and also for funds allocated through the 14th Finance Commission. The plan is to carry out similar exercises for other programmes and schemes run by different ministries to bring a sense of accountability and transparency into 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.

However, civil society activists and experts believe 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 Right to Information Act (RTI). That, however, has suffered tremendously in the past 2-3 years. Extending social audits to other programmes while weakening RTI, is like breaking the legs, and then offering crutches,” Reetika Khera, associate professor, IIM Ahmedabad told Business Standard.

Officials said that social audits were required to be done under MGNERGA, but since its inception more than a decade ago, such audits weren’t done in a structured manner.

However, in the last 5-6 years, social audits have got a fresh impetus after Centre notified a structured auditing standard in cooperation with 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 (TISS) and National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj, Hyderabad, has also developed a short-term certificate course on social audits for district and block resource persons and SHGs.

It is under the same that so far 60,000 women from SHGs and 5000-6000 resource persons have been trained to do social audit of MGNREGA.

Funds are allocated separately from MGNREGA for social audits.