• Accountability
• Government
• Private sector

Accountability

This paper summarises some of the initiatives to enhance public accountability in India. These are divided into two categories: initiatives from the government and those that emanated primarily from civil society. India’s economic and institutional reforms provided the setting in which these initiatives were launched.

Notable among the government’s initiatives were the creation of citizen charters in important public services, legislation to facilitate the public’s right to information, and experiments in e-governance in sectors and departments serving business and citizens in general.

Civil society sought increased transparency and accountability through public hearings and campaigns, notably to demand greater access to information on public expenditure, generated and used public feedback on services through devices such as “report cards”, and launched campaigns to increase transparency in the political (election) process.

The authors say that these experiments signal a clear shift of focus from the traditional “vertical” accountability mechanisms to mechanisms of a “horizontal” nature. However, They identify the following three challenges facing the public accountability initiatives in India:

• scaling up the movement for increased accountability to cover larger areas and wider sets of issues in governance has not been easy. It is not merely a problem of resource constraints
• resource constraints can also discourage the expansion of people's movements
• when movements emerge in the face of the crises that communities or groups face, there is a tendency for them to wane as the crises get defused or moderated.

• poverty reduction will be a low priority as far as accountability is concerned. Despite the rhetoric about poverty reduction, it was macroeconomic stability, and trade and industry liberalisation that were at the top in the reform agenda
• it is easier for governments to create institutions, laws and other mechanisms than to ensure their effectiveness. Thus, many "horizontal" accountability institutions will be set up. But it will be difficult for the poor to access them

• Full text of document
• Publisher details
• Send to a friend