Experience in the 90s makes ground for bottom-up approach

Social audits on the working of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), now compulsory, grew from pioneering experiments by non-government relief groups in Rajasthan.

A famine had hit hard in the early 1990s, recalls Aruna Roy, Magsaysay award winner, whose Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan’s experience on redressal provided some of the base for both the present social audit schemes’ legal backing and NREGS itself. Food was being given in lieu of wages. There was no way to know what people were entitled to and what they got. The activists went through government records, entreated offices and officials and then took this data to the people and cross-checked.

 

The records were read out at a jan sunwai or public hearing. Invariably, they shamed the officials concerned, as they exposed the difference on the ground between entitlements and the actual gains to the people. The social audit, evolved from these trial and error attempts of civil society in Rajasthan, is today enshrined in the form of rules notified by the Union government.