MADURAI
The Tamil Nadu State AIDS Control Society (TANSACS), the nodal agency for the AIDS control programme in the State, has not submitted its annual and audit reports since 2013-14 to the Registration Department, as mandated by the Tamil Nadu Societies Registration Act (TNSRA).
This non-compliance raises questions over TANSACS’ existence as a registered society since action can be taken under Section 44 (3) of TNSRA to declare a society defunct if it failed to submit mandatory documents for three consecutive years.
TANSACS was recently in news after HIV-infected blood from a donor was transfused to a pregnant woman in Aruppukkottai in Virudhunagar district in December 2019, causing apprehensions over the efficiency of the blood collection and storage programme, a wing of TANSACS.
While reports were not submitted by TANSACS for the past five years, documents accessed from Registration Department and subsequent enquiries by The Hindu showed that its submitted reports were not accepted for filing since 2004-05.
A search on TANSACS on the Registration Department’s website said ‘Not filed for the past 18 years’ on the column indicating the status on submission of compliance documents.
A senior official from the department said that non-acceptance of documents from 2004-05 could be due to delay in submissions, issues with the documents, or other procedural delays. “However, non-submission since 2013-14 is unacceptable by a government body. Sadly, the department is not quick to act on these violations due to resource constraints,” he said.
An internal circular of the department, dated January 19, 2019, asked all District Registrars to swiftly initiate action against the societies that had not submitted yearly compliance documents.
The audit report of TANSACS for 2014-15, the last audit report available on National Aids Control Organisation (NACO) website, said that the auditors were not provided with documents to show that the society is still kept alive despite repeated reminders.
D. Roopsingh Robinson Rajkumar, RTI activist, said that this non-compliance was only the tip of the iceberg of the problems plaguing TANSACS. “While TANSACS was the pioneer in AIDS control in the country once, it is now full of problems,” he claimed.
Conceding that there were gaps in compliance to TNSRA, K. Senthil Raj, Project Director, TANSACS, said that the organisation was working with Registration Department to sort out the issues. However, he did not elaborate on reasons for non-submission of reports.
“A key issue is that we are expected to intimate the Registration Department whenever there is a change in board membership. Since most of our board members are Secretaries of other departments, changes happen frequently. We are seeking an exemption to this requirement,” he said.
He also said that more than compliance to TNSRA, what was important was the monitoring by NACO. “We comply to stringent auditing mechanisms of NACO and all our annual reports are submitted to them,” he said.
