Social audit as tool of strengthening accountability and transparency in rural local self-governance

Based on the principle of democratic local governance, social audit is carried out with the consent, understanding and cooperation of all the members of Gram Sabha. It focuses on assessing the physical and financial gaps, creating awareness, increasing efficacy and effectiveness, scrutiny of policy decisions and estimation of the opportunity cost or reduction of wastage to improve the performance of Panchayats. The present paper has been devoted to discuss the facets of social audit, its weaknesses and suggest suitable measures to make it an effective tool of strengthening accountability and transparency in rural local self-governance. There is no denying the fact that the social audit trains the stakeholders and general masses, encourages rural local democracy and collective decisions, provides benefits to disadvantaged and makes rural local leadership more responsive, responsible and accountable but it has certain weaknesses because it is time consuming; lacks appropriate and correct methodology and scope; subjective, untrained personnel; indifferent attitude and vested interests; lack of follow up actions and so on. The measures suggested include awareness generation, effective involvement of stakeholders, committed elected representatives and leaders, functionaries to work as facilitators, effective involvement of civil society and media, training and retraining, action-oriented approach, strict vigil etc.