UPSC Express

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. Civil society organizations (CSOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), political representatives, civil servants and local people collectively organize such social audits.

Importance of social audit as tool of citizen centric governance:

• It values the voice of stakeholders, including marginalized/poor groups whose voices are rarely heard.
• It also trains the community on participatory local planning.
• It strengthens accountability and transparency in local bodies.
• It involves those people in developmental activities for whom schemes are targeted, thus reducing corruption.
• It promotes collective decision making and shared responsibilities.
• It develops human resources and social capital by educating them.

Various mechanisms of social audit in India are:

• The 73rd amendment of the Indian Constitution empowers the gram sabhas to conduct Social Audits in addition to its other functions.
• Social audits were made statutory for the first time in National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005.
• Recently, Meghalaya became the first state in India to operationalize a law that makes social audit of government programmes and schemes a part of government practice.

Way Forward:

Social audit strengths the democracy by empowering citizens. But there is no mechanism in India for its effective implementation. Powers to audit NGOs, summon ministers and former secretaries and a monitoring mechanism for following up the effective implementation of the recommendations are some of the proposals of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on the auditing reforms.