Social Audit
Description
Empowering Communities: Understanding Social Audits and
Their Role in Accountability
Description: Explore the concept of social audits and their significance in promoting transparency and accountability in local governance.
What is Social Audit?
A social audit is a way of measuring, understanding, reporting and ultimately improving an organization’s social and ethical performance. A social audit helps to narrow gaps between vision/goal and reality, between efficiency and effectiveness. It is a technique to understand, measure, verify, report on and to improve the social performance of the organization.
Social auditing creates an impact upon governance. It values the voice of stakeholders, including marginalized/poor groups whose voices are rarely heard. Social auditing is taken up for the purpose of enhancing local governance, particularly for strengthening accountability and transparency in local bodies.
The key difference between development and social audit is that a social audit focuses on the neglected issue of social impacts, while a development audit has a broader focus including environment and economic issues, such as the efficiency of a project or programme.
Objectives of Social Audit
• Assessing the physical and financial gaps between needs and resources available for local development.
• Creating awareness among beneficiaries and providers of local social and productive services.
• Increasing efficacy and effectiveness of local development programmes.
• Scrutiny of various policy decisions, keeping in view stakeholder interests and priorities, particularly of rural poor.
• Estimation of the opportunity cost for stakeholders of not getting timely access to public services.
Status in India
Social Audit is recognized by many, including the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), as a powerful tool to enforce transparency and accountability.
Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was the first Act to mandate Social Audits by the Gram Sabha of all the projects taken up in the Gram Panchayat. According to Section 17 of the MGNREGA, 2005: ‘The Gram Sabha shall conduct regular social audits of all the projects under the scheme taken up within the Gram Panchayat’. MGNREGA Audit of Schemes Rules was passed by the Central Government, in consultation with the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) in 2011.
In addition to MGNREGA, few States have taken up social audit of other schemes as well. Pradhan Mantri Aawas Yojana-Gramin (PMAY-G) audits are done in Uttar Pradesh, Meghalaya and West Bengal. National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP) audits are done in Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal. Meghalaya Legislature has enacted ‘The Meghalaya Community Participation and Public Services Social Audit Act, 2017’ which mandates social audit in 26 different schemes in Education, Health, Rural Development and other areas.
Advantages of Social Audit
• It helps the local community in planning.
• It supports the democratic function in the community.
• It helps in enhancing the image of an organization in the eyes of the internal as well as the external public.
• It assists in the growth and development of human resources.
• Social audits provide a way for companies to measure and evaluate their level of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and identify areas where they can improve.
• Implementing the recommendations of social auditors can demonstrate a company’s commitment to social responsibility and stakeholder engagement.
• When a company publishes its social audit reports, it demonstrates that the company is willing to be open and honest about its social and environmental impact. Improved transparency and accountability towards social responsibility can attract more business customers and consumers.
• Through social audit, people can voice their concerns and grievances about the implementation of programs and projects in their area.
• It empowers citizens to participate in governance.
• It can increase the effectiveness of a program.
• It provides a feedback mechanism for the program/project team.
• It helps to identify the best practices used in a program/project. Thereby increasing the effectiveness of the program/project.
• It can create a sense of belonging among the participants as they are actively involved in the process.
• It promotes good local governance by providing a platform for local communities to hold their elected officials and government bodies accountable for their actions.
• This creates a system for grievance redressal, ensuring that the concerns of the community.
Challenges Associated with Social Audit
• In several states, Gram Panchayats are not required to provide Social Audit Units with records pertaining to work completion and expenditures, and Gram Sabhas are not provided with social audit reports in their native tongues.
• Many governments do not adhere to the transparent selection procedure for the director of the Social Audit Units.
• There are no fines or legal repercussions for breaking rules and guidelines, Social Audit is a pointless endeavour.
• Vote bank politics is there with every ruling party. Freebies to be promised while an election is around the corner are very much there with the ruling government. A social audit was thus intended on paper to check a certain extent of pilferage and bad work on the spot of execution. The government is publishing widely the effectiveness of social audits on paper. But the reality is that no one in government is giving so much importance to this audit. There is no awareness.
To be effective, the social auditor must have the right to:
1. seek clarifications from the implementing agency about any decision-making, activity, scheme, income and expenditure incurred by the agency;
2. consider and scrutinize existing schemes and local activities of the agency; and
3. access registers and documents relating to all development activities undertaken by the implementing agency or by any other government department.
This requires transparency in the decision-making and activities of the implementing agencies. In a way, social audit includes measures for enhancing transparency by enforcing the right to information in the planning and implementation of local development activities.
Way forward
To sum up, the following proposals can be made to make social audit a regular and effective institution to promote the culture of transparency and accountability through the Gram Sabha.
1. States should enhance Gram Sabha powers to make them effective instruments of participatory decision-making and ensuring accountability of PRIs in local development planning.
2. An agency like the Ombudsman can be set up to look into complaints of local maladministration.
3. Development functionaries found guilty of violating established norms for local development planning should be punished.
4. It is important to ensure that rural poor are given due protection when they wish to stand up to speak against any misconduct.
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