Transparency is the newest item on the agenda of many Rajasthan ministers and MPs. C P Joshi, the man who lost the Rajasthan Assembly elections last year by just one vote, to later become the Union minister for rural development, started the trend.
He got 52 NGOs led by Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan (MKSS) to conduct social audits of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme in his constituency, Bhilwara, last week.
Bharat Singh, the state’s rural development minister, wants the next district-wide social audit on NREGP to be held in his constituency of Kota. The MP from Alwar and its present titular head, Doon-educated Jitendra Singh, has also got in touch with MKSS for a repeat of Bhilwara in his constituency. Then there is state health minister Aimaduddin Ahmed, who has sought the help of MKSS and other NGOs for a social audit of the health sector in the state, which could get many health officials, doctors and others the limelight they would never want.
The social audits in Bhilwara, which concluded on October 12, had sarpanchs clashing with auditors at public hearings in some places, police cases lodged against panchayat secretaries and sarpanchs in 28 places and, in one place, the sarpanch returning by cheque Rs 1,37,000 that was found unaccounted.
Social audit teams had fanned out into villages in the 11 blocks of the district with data and information on NREGP available with the Government and cross-checked with villagers, to stumble on many cases of misrepresentation of facts. There was then a block-level presentation on October 11. Bharat Singh has already announced an allowance of Rs 3,000 to every sarpanch for carrying out work under NREGP. He made another promise: that by the end of this month, every panchayat would display boards showing all details of every person who works under NREGP so that there is no distortion of facts.