Public accountability

While the proposed Board for Restructuring of Public Sector Enterprises (BRPSE) is expected to focus on reviving troubled government-owned enterprises, one of the areas it would do well to spend some time on, as former Disinvestment Minister Arun Shourie has just shown in Indian Express, is basic corporate governance.

Mr Shourie has given examples of PSUs in West Bengal that haven't filed their returns from, hold your breath, their inception in 1951-52! And if they haven't even filed their returns, where's the question of even being able to see if the money given to or earned by these PSUs hasn't been siphoned off, or used for other purposes""like shoring up the state's budget?

Mr Shourie has concentrated his guns on the Left Front-ruled state of West Bengal since it is the Left that is the loudest votary of the public sector. But what's true of West Bengal is true of the rest of the country as well, perhaps to an even greater degree.

The erstwhile DESU, which got converted to the Delhi Vidyut Board in 1997, had its accounts last audited in 1991-92, and even at that point in time the auditors had said they had no idea if the opening balances in the books were correct.

The DVB's accounts from 1996-97 to 2000-01 were finalised only in 2001-02, just prior to its privatisation. In Assam, the Assam Seeds Corporation finalised its accounts for 1990-91 more than a decade after the event, in 2001-02.

The Assam Livestock and Poultry Corporation is one better and finalised its accounts for 1985-86 in 2002, and the Assam Government Marketing Corporation finalised its 1982-83 accounts only in 2000-01! The list goes on. The Andhra Pradesh State Textile Development Corporation, to cite another example, finalised the 1988-89 returns 12 years after the event.

What's worse than this is that the country's legislators don't appear to be bothered by this state of affairs. Mr Shourie has given examples of how, in West Bengal, 503 of the CAG's comments (called audit 'paragraphs') on 54 PSUs were not replied to at the end of September 2001.

Well, in the case of the Delhi government, the Committee on Government Undertakings discussed just one of the nine paras for 2000-01, a bit better than in 1999-00 when not even one of the seven paragraphs was selected for review.

Not even one of the 18 audit paragraphs in the Andhra Pradesh report of 2001-02 was discussed by the state's Committee on Public Undertakings; ditto for the six larger reviews done for PSUs in the state. Kerala's 24 audit paras suffered the same fate.

Getting the government to give more funds to PSUs is one thing, but surely it is the responsibility of the country's politicians to also keep a watchful eye on how the money gets spent.