Value of Social Audit
A VILLAGE FESTIVAL CALLED SOCIAL AUDIT
Public Participation Makes the Real Difference
Sowmya Kidambi and Rakshita Swamy*
I n 1994, when the first public audit (jan sunwai) of development expenditure in a panchayat in rural Rajasthan was held, little did one think that it would herald a national legislation for Right to Information. The small but momentous event, which was held in a farmland under a retired paratrooper’s parachute, formed the bedrock of what would in later years emerge as a discipline called the ‘social audits’. The emergence of social audit as a demand in terms of democratic participation was simultaneous to the progress being made by the campaign for enacting and implementing the Right to Information (RTI) Act 2005. It is no coincidence that the most popular slogan of the RTI movement, ‘Hamaara
Paisa, Hamaara Hisaab’ (our money, our accounts) was in fact a demand of people to audit government accounts as a means of exercising their democratic right. The inception of platforms such as jan sunwais which entailed reading out of records in the midst of the community in an open public place and corroborate its narrative with actual reality, intuitively aligned with the natural principles of audit. Citizens, individually and collectively, understood the critical role that access to information, independence of the platform and documented evidence played in the sunwais for them to result in institutional change. A decade-long experience in advocating for the citizen’s right
to access public information held under state control, and use it as a foundation to evaluate the performance of the latter had its first victory with the legal mandate of social audit under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) 2005. The MGNREGA (under Section 17 of the Act) became the first legislation, in the country and in the world, which mandated social audits in gram panchayats to evaluate the performance and expenditure of a government programme.
