Social audit teams being trained at NIRDPR-NERC

GUWAHATI: The Department of Social Justice and Empowerment (DoSJE) under the Central Government has taken a decision to conduct social audit of all its schemes to improve transparency and accountability in the implementation of its programmes in view of the fact that social audit is a an effective social accountability tool where beneficiaries or stakeholders are involved in the planning and monitoring of welfare programmes and information is proactively disclosed and disseminated so that official records can be compared against ground realities.

The department has come up with a five-year social audit plan in which the schemes being covered have been clubbed into four broad categories: Schemes covering Grant in Aid institutions (senior citizen home, drug de-addiction centres); scholarship schemes covering SC and OBC students (post-matric, pre-matric etc.,) Pradhan Mantri Anusuchit Jaati Abhyuday Yojana (PM-AJAY) and PCR schemes; and PM Shrestha.

According to a press release, the social audits are to be carried out by the Social Audit Units (SAUs) which have already been set up in every State. Each SAU will form a Social Justice Cell consisting of 5-15 Social audit resource persons to be named Social Justice Cell who will be dedicated for social audit of DoSJE schemes.

A National Resource Cell for Social Audits (NRCSA-DoSJE) has been established at Centre for Social Audit-NIRDPR to oversee the smooth roll out of the social audit programme as envisioned. The NRCSA-DoSJE will coordinate with the State SAUs to monitor the progress and quality of social audits conducted and handhold and support the SAUs training and capacity building requirements. The NRCSA-DSJE will act as a bridge between the DSJE and the State SAUs to ensure efficient conduct of social audits.

The training of Social Justice Cell members is now being organized regionally to train the resource persons from social audit units, The training for States of Assam ,Tripura ,Sikkim and Meghalaya is being organized at North Eastern Regional Centre of the National Institute of Rural Development & Panchayati Raj (NIRDPR-NERC), Guwahati from November 2 to November 11.

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