Out of the 34 States and union territories only six have completed social audit of works done under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) in more than 50% of gram panchayats. And Kerala is the only State to cover 100% gram panchayats. High rate of corruption is one of the primary complaints against the scheme and social audit is the inbuilt anti-corruption mechanism in the Act.
These statistics are sourced from the Management Information System (MIS) on Social Audit maintained by the Union Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) as on November 10.
Section 17 of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) says the gram sabha “shall monitor the execution of works”. Each State has social audit units which are supposed to work independent of the implementing authorities. The auditing standards laid down by the Comptroller and Auditor General were issued only on December 19, 2016. According to them, every Social Audit Unit is entitled to funds equivalent to 0.5% of the MGNREGA expenditure incurred by the State in the previous year. The audit involves quality checks of infrastructure created under the MGNREGA, financial misappropriation in wages, and checking for any procedural deviations.
Uniform problem
Other than Kerala the only States to cross the 50% mark are Bihar (64.4%), Gujarat (58.8%), Jammu and Kashmir (64.1%), Odisha (60.42%) and Uttar Pradesh (54.97%). Only three States have covered 40% or more villages — Telangana (40.5%), Himachal Pradesh (45.32%) and Andhra Pradesh (49.7%). Other than Telangana, among the poll-bound States, the numbers are really low — Madhya Pradesh (1.73%), Mizoram (17.5%) Chhattisgarh (25.06%), and Rajasthan (34.74%). The problem is uniform irrespective of the party in power across the country.
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The Centre has, multiple times, reminded the States that if the social audits are not conducted regularly, then the funds under the MGNREGS will be withheld. The States complain that the audit is delayed because the Centre does not release the funds for the social audit units, which work independent of the State governments, in time. There are recurrent complaints of delayed salaries for the village-level auditors.
Kerala’s Rural Development Minister M.B. Rajesh said theirs was the only State that also holds periodic Social Audit Public Hearings (Janakeeya Sabhas) at the panchayat level to subject the audit reports to close public scrutiny. In the other States, such public scrutiny is done only at the block level. “We have taken a host of measures to make our social auditing mechanism robust, including holding periodic panchayat-level public hearings where all stakeholders participate. And anyway, Kerala has a healthy culture of people’s participation in governance,” Mr. Rajesh said.