Social Audit of Social Sector Schemes:

• The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment has formulated a scheme, namely Information Monitoring, Evaluation and Social Audit (IMESA) in FY 202122.
• Under this scheme, Social Audits are to be conducted for all the schemes of the Department starting FY 202122.
• These social audits are done through Social Audit Units (SAU) of the States and National Institute for Rural Development and Panchayati Raj.

About Social Audit

• 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.
• It is a technique to understand, measure, verify, report on and to improve the social performance of the organization.
• Social auditing creates an impact upon governance.
• It values the voice of stakeholders, including marginalized/poor groups whose voices are rarely heard. Social auditing is taken up for the purpose of enhancing local governance, particularly for strengthening accountability and transparency in local bodies.

Advantage of social audit:

• It helps in Managing and measuring non-financial activities.
• monitor internal and external consequences of the departments social and commercial interest
• It leads to Understanding of the administrative system from the perspective of the people: How the process and rules affect the citizens for whom these systems have been developed.
• It provides In-depth scrutiny and analysis of the working of the public utility vis a vis its social relevance.
• Organisation can asses its social, economic and environmental impacts through social audit.
• It act as tool of feedback which can lead to improvement in policy implementation.
• It allows Verification of deliverables thus bringing focus on outcomes and outputs rather than inputs.
• It is a Safeguards against corruption and frauds.

Limitation of Social audit:

• It is Highly localised in nature. It is conducted at the gram sabha level and its findings cant be generalized in nature.
• It has been Sproadic and adhoc in nature. Most of the social audit depends upon the will of executive to conduct.
• Social audits haven’t resulted into penalizing the erring officer which has led to decline in interest of these audits.
• documentation for the social audits do not provide consistent evidence.

Way Forward:

• It should be brought into mainstream for all the social sector schemes
• It Can be mainstreamed for undertaking compliance audit for all the social sector schemes related to rules, frauds and corruption.
• Government should Facilitate CAG association with local auditors for certification of Gram Sabha accounts.
• Government should Develop partnership with all the major social auditors and bring out the standard proceedure for social auditing
• CAG should provide capacity building of social auditors
• Synergy with CAG will help in dissemination of the role of CAG of India in appraisal and monitoring of public sector programme.
• There is a need to Give recognition to the social auditors

Examples of social audit

 Social audit in Jharnipalli Panchayat, Agaipur block, Bolangir district, Orissa

• In October 2001, the gram sabha members of Jharnipalli Panchayat conducted a oneday social audit of development works carried out in the panchayat over the preceding three years. This audit took place with the active participation of many individuals and agencies, including block and district administration officials, MKSS [Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan], NCPRI [National Campaign for People’s Right to Information] and Action Aid India.

The audit found that:

• Although the works were not carried out, the sanctioned funds were shown in the records as having been utilized.
• Contractors were banned under government guidelines, but 31 contractors were working on the project.
• Muster rolls were not maintained by the contractors.
• Instead of the target of 100 mandays of employment for families below the poverty line (BPL), only 12 half days of work were generated.
• The BPL families could not buy subsidized food from the public distribution system (PDS) shops as partial wages because they did not possess the needed ration cards.