Transparency, Accountability and Participation through Social Audit: Case of MGNREGA in Sikkim, India

Abstract

Transparency, accountability and participation (TAP) are some essential elements for ensuring democratic governance. Social audit is an operational instrument to reduce corruption by empowering people to scrutinize public expenses, detect corruption, and ensure accountability. Social audit is one of the robust element of MGNREGS (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme) in India as they work through the Panchayat, and stimulate the public to participate with a sense of communal accountability. At the state level even five years after the issue of operational guidelines, we witness wide variations in the quality of social audits. Different states have adopted their own models and while some of them are successful, some of the states have still not set up and some are in the process of setting up an independent social audit unit. The Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) model of social audit in the state of Sikkim which is not widely discussed in literature is the focus of the study. This research attempts to study the efficacy of Social audit as a tool to bring Transparency, Accountability and Participation in MGNREGA taking the case of Sikkim.