Citizen oversight and India's right to work program

Can citizens’ voices improve the performance of large-scale government anti-poverty programs? India’s national rural employment guarantee program (NREGA) has provided employment to over 50 million households since its launch in 2005. NREGA also includes a transparency and accountability process—social audits—that enables collective action for public oversight. State governments are responsible for facilitating social audits through local governments, or panchayats, to prevent fraud and abuse of NREGA funds. In practice, however, a majority of local governments either lack capacity or are captured by vested interests. So far, only two state governments have created social audit units with the autonomy needed to prevent capture by vested interests. The states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana established a neutral body—the Society for Social Audit Accountability and Transparency (SSAAT)—that is independent both of the state government administration and political patronage networks. Over the last decade, SSAAT has organized over 9,125 public hearings across these two states.