Social Audit

A social audit is a means of checking official documents to see if state-reported expenditures match what was really spent on the ground. Democratic governance legally empowers

citizens to ask questions, file grievances, and be part of the corrective process. Social audit is a powerful tool by which transparency, accountability and people’s participation can be ensured.

• It closes the gap between the vision/goal and reality, as well as between efficiency and effectiveness. It is a strategy for analysing, measuring, verifying, reporting on, and improving an organisation’s social performance.

Significance of Social Audit: 

• Identifying the loopholes: The legislative and executive use social audit to uncover problems and provide an opportunity to take proactive measures and develop remedies.

• Social audits assists departments in reorienting and refocusing priorities in tune with people’s expectations.
• Trains the community on participatory local planning.
• Promotes inclusive growth by involving the weaker sections of the society in decision making.
• Develops human resources and social capital.
• Promotes collective decision making and sharing responsibilities.
• Creating the space and platform for dialogue amongst different levels of stakeholders.
• Timely grievance redressal.
• Strengthening the democratic process and institutions.
• Building people’s pressure for better implementation of programmes.

Successful Examples:

• MGNREG Act 2005 was the first act in India to mandate social auditing. Many states have also facilitated Social Audit in other programmes, including PM
• Awas Yojana, National Social Assistance Programme, Midday meal scheme and Public Distribution Scheme.
• Meghalaya became the first state to pass a Social Audit law, the Meghalaya Community Participation and Public Services Social Audit Act. The act mandates social audit across 21 schemes and 11 departments. The audit is based on traditional tribal institutions.

Challenges in Implementation of Social Audits: 

• Unwillingness to institutionalise social audits due to a lack of administrative and political will.
• The scope of social audits is extremely localised and covers only certain selected aspects.
• Several social problems require a holistic approach to be successful. So social audit should take that into consideration. Eg. rural health requires convergence between water supply, education, sanitation, nutrition etc.
• Resistance on part of local authorities to share information with stakeholders.
• Limited people’s participation due to lack of education, awareness and capacity building among the common masses.
• Absence of trained auditors.
• There is an absence of an independent organisation to investigate and act on social audit findings.

How to make Social Audit better and efficient: 

• Enhancing the demand system by investment in education and awareness, and sharing information of the public/gram sabha members.
• Emphasising capacity building at the human and organisational levels in terms of information storage and delivery mechanisms at the PRI, block, and DRDA levels.
• Encouraging civil society organisations and NGOs to play a proactive role in conducting
• social audits.
• Social audit findings must be legally enforceable, and state governments should implement specific standards in this regard.
• Every six months, every Gram Panchayat must conduct a social audit.

A social audit committee can be established at each level of the PRI to audit the performance of each tier individually. These committees can be formed depending on the type of programmes or schemes that need to be audited, but they shouldn’t be permanent.