Toki named social audit panel head

SHILLONG: The state government, after getting the Social Audit Bill passed by the Assembly during the last session, constituted the Social Audit Council and appointed former IAS officer Toki Blah as its chairman.
Chief Minister Mukul Sangma, after meeting Blah at his office chamber in Shillong on Wednesday, told media persons that the Council is formed to create an environment that will make transparency and accountability the order of the day.
Sangma believes the initiative which is unique to Meghalaya will be replicated by other states of the country.
“Meghalaya is the first state to have a Social Audit Act, which will empower people to audit expenditure of the government which is funded by the public exchequer,” he said and added that the people will now take the responsibility to ensure that quality work is carried out by all departments.
“The beauty of this concept is that it will create an environment where there will be less scope for irregularities in the course of the implementation of schemes and projects since there will be concurrent auditing. Instead of the usual postmortem after a project is implemented, now irregularities can be checked on time and that is how corruption can be checked,” Sangma said.
Social auditing, which is already embedded in the MGNREGA, would make it easier for people to understand what it entails, he added.
The chairman has a tenure of five years and all heads and secretaries of all departments will be part of the Council that would also include civil society organisations and the deputy commissioners of all districts and various resource persons.
Meanwhile, the newly appointed chairman said the Council will mobilise public and civil societies to be part of the government’s development activities and thereby carry out a concurrent audit of all developmental works in the State.
“With this initiative, we hope to achieve greater transparency and accountability in all developmental activities and government services, besides bringing the concept of public ownership in governance,” Blah said.