Social Audit For Democratic Governance

Abstract

With democratic values reaching The Grass root level there is an increasing demand to ensure proper accountability in the system coupled with increasing participation of people in the decision making process. There is an increasing realization in most of modern democracy that in order to insure responsiveness in the system we need to create structures where by the citizens can participate in the functioning of government and can even question them. This kind of responsiveness needs to have civil society engagement in governance. A well governed system needs to be transparent and accountable but to make a system transparent and accountable is a difficult task. Most of the beneficiaries of government scheme are poor and ignorant masses. These people don't even know about the government schemes rolled out by government for their upliftment. So in order to improve governance at the local level one has to make the citizens aware about their Civic responsibilities and the knowledge about policies and programmes and their entitlements. The state also needs to create avenues for the participation of citizens and civil society organizations in policy formulation and implementation. The whole idea of governance was shared by World Bank and IMF. These two agencies in the reports highlighted basic tenets of governance like transparency, accountability and rule of law. The basic idea behind wearing the concept of good governance is true to place a check on State Power. Initially when they introduced the concept the justification given for this was that it will reduce poverty unemployment and will induce growth in their system. But in reality they gave this concept of good governance for the markets to flourish and wanted the state to create an environment favourable for the markets to flourish. In this article we will try to highlight that even after streamlining our system on the principles of good governance, governance still remains a major cause of concern for Indian state as the real beneficiaries of government policies still remain ignorant about the policies formulated by the government in their favor plus there is a very poor system of checks and balances at the local level. In this we have advocated that proper implementation of social audit at the local level will ensure accountability and it is only through social accountability that the problem of corruption can be tackled.