Social Audits in Rajasthan: Despite Progress, Much Work Remains
by Priyanka Varma, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan, MKSS

Over the last two decades, civil society organizations, academics, and researchers have debated different methods for measuring and improving transparency and accountability in development programs meant for the poor. Social audits have emerged as a powerful method — one which is able to reach those areas of information reserve and bring it in the public domain, which conventional audit mechanisms and agencies have been unable to.
Unlike traditional audits, a social audit is not a one time, but a continuous exercise, that audits expenditure, its usefulness, and its impact. It thereby tries to ensure that the activity or project is designed and implemented in a manner that is most suited for the prevailing (local) conditions, appropriately reflects the priorities and preferences of those affected by it, and most effectively serves public interest. Such a process provides for effective people’s participation in monitoring expenditure and influencing decision making in the formulation and implementation of development programs.
Accessing relevant information, consolidating it in a manner that people can easily comprehend, and facilitating a verification process by the stakeholders are some of the basic steps undertaken in a Social Audit. In doing so, the process also helps create awareness about people's rights and entitlements.
The NREGA and Social Audits
In the Indian state of Rajasthan, a network of civil society organizations called the Rozgar Evum Suchna Ka Adhikar Abhiyan has been conducting social audits of projects under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) for close to three years now.
Passed in 2005, the Act guarantees 100 days of employment each year to any rural household whose adult members are willing to do unskilled manual work. Failure to provide work within 15 days, gives the applicant a right to claim unemployment allowance.
Despite this progress, however, most people remain unaware of their rights and entitlements under the NREGA. The information flow has been minimal, with the administration taking little or no initiative. Inadequate staff and lack of training have also been areas of concern.
Unlike the previous employment schemes, in the country - beset with a range of problems from lack of awareness, planning and people’s participation, low quality of assets, diversion of funds and no public accountability, the NREGA provides for two distinct and extremely powerful legal provisions – transparency and public monitoring. The passage of the Right to Information Act (RTI) in the year 2005 — have made social audits of the NREGA possible and strengthened these provisions since access to information is the primary and most crucial step in conducting a Social Audit.
Regular social audits since then and the presence of people's groups in certain areas have resulted in strong transparency measures, such as transparency boards at worksites detailing the funds allocated for (and spent on) labor and material. Also, the availability of muster rolls in nearly all the worksites has considerably reduced delays in wage payment and nonpayment of wages. Large numbers of men and women have attended the public hearings held as part of the audits to testify against false records and register their discontent, despite enormous pressure placed by local powers.
Apart from corrupt practices and deviation of funds that get identified in these social audits, such exercises also allow a discussion on various other features of a program, which get overlooked or unaddressed otherwise.
In the case of the Abhiyan, the social audits proposed that addressing basic issues like adequate honorarium and allowance to elected representatives, increasing administrative, technical and managerial staff at the lowest level and establishing responsibility for proper maintenance of records will also clear away instances and scope for possible monetary deviations and reduce the slack in implementation.
Resistance to Social Audits
Nearly all of the social audits conducted by the Abhiyan have been in coordination with the state government, local authorities, and field-level functionaries. The three have come together on a number of occasions to discuss findings of the social audits and worked towards correcting the problems and strengthening the NREGA.
However, two audits recently organized by the Abhiyan in the district of Banswara and Jhalawar encountered strong resistance, even violence. Despite the strong transparency provisions in the NREGA and the RTI, members of the Abhiyan had to stage sit-in protests to access records. A wide array of local actors opposed the social audits, creating an air of fear and tension and making it difficult for the Abhiyan to conduct the social audit.
In Banswara, the Government of Rajasthan had itself invited the Abhiyan to do the social audit but then refused to be a part of the process in the midst of this resistance and violence. In Jhalawar, the government's failure to provide sufficient information forced the Abhiyan to restrict itself to five panchayats (small administrative governmental units usually composed of a cluster of villages); however, the audits there uncovered evidence of embezzlement in 14 different villages. There were numerous other instances of fudged muster rolls and other problems; for example, most marginalized sections of society were either denied a job card or charged for what should have been a free document.
These acts of resistance to the social audit raise fundamental questions and doubts about the government's commitment to transparency and accountability in development programs for the poor. They also expose the limits of the government's commitment to making the NREGA a healthy and successful program.
Emerging Challenges
A social audit is fundamentally a people's process. It has given shape to the idea of public vigilance in large development programs such as the NREGA, where it is nearly impossible for one person or agency to run the program. The idea of incorporating social audits in the NREGA also reflects a decade of struggle and democratic protests by ordinary men and women who realized the importance of official information to their lives and livelihood.
The events that unfolded in Banswara and Jhalawar, however, threaten to destroy this effort. The government and the local administration sought to strengthen the existing power relations in the area by resisting the social audit, in part by reading the provisions of transparency and accountability in the narrowest possible terms — announcing that the audit could be held only under the terms they themselves established. Such resistance only shows the potential of social audits to weed out the corrupt, strengthen people's entitlements, and establish accountability. The time has come for people's groups to redesign their strategies to meet these fresh rounds of attacks and keep alive democratic spaces and practices for those most marginalized.

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