Take them to task

It has become imperative for citizens to take their state and if required, national government to task. And the most practical way to do that would be in the creation of an independent citizen’s audit, whereby the wrong-doers are punished through a people’s jury in an open hearing. The violaters will be compelled to implement the same. This has become a vital neccessity in the post-liberalised world, where action should be taken against every misdeed.

Post the liberalisation and globalisation of the Indian Economy in 1991, a unique template was evolved called the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) to create infrastructure and public goods. The model rests on the ill-conceived premise that the public sector/government does not have the capacity to rollout the infrastructure required for rapid economic growth. Both federal and state governments enthusiastically embraced this model by outsourcing developmental activities to private players. The government, especially it’s officers absolved themselves of all accountability for shoddy work.

However, as this model played itself out infrastructure development became even more slip-shod with private enterprises either executing works that were of an extremely poor quality or actuated by huge cost and time overruns. More often than not private contractors simply vanish leaving projects incomplete or in a complete mess.

For the citizen who is always at his/her wits end, trying to hold the government accountable, this new animal called public-private player has become a new headache.  What can be done to hold officers in government, promoters of private companies personally responsible for not discharging their statutory duties and honouring their contractual obligations? This is a greater malaise in the real estate sector where unscrupulous criminals masquerading as builders dupe and swindle innocent people of their life savings by collecting money in advance for housing projects.

The only way to hold government servants and private contractors accountable for their performance is through an independent citizen’s audit of each public work institutionalised into the sanction order/contract of each public work itself done post it’s completion. The findings of the citizen’s audit would then be presented to a people’s jury in an open hearing. It should be left to the people’s jury to then pick a punishment from a menu prescribed for minor/major violations and the government would then be duty bound to implement it.  

Imagine if thousands of such hearings start taking place across villages/cities of India, and errant official’s and private contractors start getting penalised and punished, this would put the fear of god into the deliberately inefficient, temperamentally indolent and the downright maleficent breed of government and private players. A template for Social Audit’s already exists in MNREGA and various other legislations.

Insofar as private builders are concerned while the new Real Estate Regulatory Act has attempted to make them accountable for their actions but the real remedy lies in citizen’s bodies prosecuting them under criminal law. For such robber barons, the old proverb spare the rod and spoil the builder must strictly apply.

— Manish Tewari writer is a lawyer and the former Union Information and Broadcasting Minister. He serves as a distinguished senior fellow with a Washington-based Think Tank-The Atlantic Council ) and he Tweets @manishtewari.