What do you understand by the term Social Audit? Discuss the significance and limitations of such audits?
Refer – The Hindu
IAS Parliament 7 years
KEY POINTS
Social audit
· Social audit is where information is to be proactively shared amongst people. They can, in turn, “performance audit” a service or programme.
· It involves people in planning, implementation and evaluation phases.
· Sharing information, recording comments and acting on findings are the processes involved.
Significance
· The breakdown of credibility in various public institutions in the recent past has become a concern.
· This has highlighted that democracy and especially public funds need eternal public vigilance.
· Democratic governance needs the citizen to be legally empowered.The Citizen should be able to ask questions, file complaints, and be a part of the corrective process.
· Social audit could be a solution towards this end.
· Social audits facilitate acting upon the inconsistent facts.
· It transfers the power of scrutiny and validation to the people.
· It thus essentially facilitates a citizen-centric mode of accountability.
· By this, transparency can be combined with an institutionalised form of accountability to the people.
· It shifts the relationship between the powerful and the powerless from patronage to rights.
· People directly observe the implementation of Government programmes in their region making the process participatory.
· This, in the long run, empowers the people and makes the process of development more inclusive.
Limitations
· The main obstacle to the development of social auditing is the demand on resources and staff time.
· Social Audit has a very limited access to data and lacks expertise at the ground level.
· Inadequate administrative and political will in institutionalizing social audit are the other obstacles.
· Monitoring through social audits is informal and unprocessed with limited follow-up action.
· The scope of social audits is intensive but highly localized and covers only certain selected aspects.
