When govt doubles as NGO

The MGNREGS social audit in Andhra Pradesh is receiving both praise and brickbats

The social audit directorate set up by the Andhra Pradesh government to monitor the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has emerged as a model. Academics are praising it, and states such as Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Tamil Nadu are preparing to replicate it.

At the same time, questions are being raised on whether social audit done by a non-governmental organisation (NGO) formed by the government - a contradiction in terms - can be considered social. Won't it become a government-sponsored audit?

Here is how social audit of the 100 days' work programme takes place: The audit is done by a society set up by the government, the social audit directorate, headed by a person from an NGO.

Whether a government can set up an NGO is difficult to answer. But in Andhra Pradesh, it has happened, earlier, too, as in the case of the Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP); in Kerala the Kudumbashri case is an example.

The social audit directorate is headed by activist Saumya, a protege of Aruna Roy who pioneered the whole idea of social audit at Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan in Rajasthan. Social audit allows people to put their entitlements against what government claims to have given them. So, if the government records show a person getting 50 days of work, the worker tells a public hearing he never worked the whole year and, thus, exposes the government.

The directorate has completed five years of conducting annual social audits of MGNREGS in 21,000 gram panchayats and 22 districts, and it is about to make it a half-yearly exercise.

The problem with the government taking over the role of an NGO is that it muffles the enterprise and voices of people outside the government. So, critics feel that a directorate such as SERP is no better than a public sector undertaking, and has thrived by killing competition.

The directorate is set up from the funds of MGNREGS, taking about 1.5 per cent of the Rs 7,000 crore the state gets for the scheme.

Critics include activists in Andhra Pradesh such as K S Gopal. He feels that letting a government set-up monopolise the entire social audit is unfair to the very concept of the exercise. It then becomes a government audit. How can the audit be proved to be good if there is no competition, he asks.

He says the directorate has been auditing MGNREGS in 21,000 villages year after year all by itself, when it should have just remained a supervisory and rule-making body.

"Let the community do the audit, and let the directorate equip the community with resources," he says.

According to Saumya, social audit is very much a people's audit, as it is done by 100,000 audit persons who are also MGNREGS job card holders. These people from the community are directly identified by facilitators of the social audit directorate. It is not a government audit, she says.

Her directorate with a workforce of 1,200 people verifies from the community the truth of every record of expense on wages and material, though leaving out administrative expenses of six per cent, which is another point that critics attack.

Saumya is now gearing up for half-yearly audits in the state and worries that the model can fail if it falls into wrong hands.

But Gopal says the only way it can be saved is by participation of other organisations in the audit, rather than through monopoly. S M Vijayanand, one of the architects of Kudumbashri and additional secretary in the rural development ministry, admits that a lot of NGOs resent such government-NGOs, since they eat into their space. But he does not accept the argument that social audit should be done by different organisations. You can have only one auditor, he says.