Promoting Transparent, Effective and Accountable Government

In the Headlines

20 December 2010

'A Sweeping Experiment in Grassroots Democracy'

India's social audit program has given the country's rural poor the means to become active citizens in their democracy—and to ensure the government is responsive to their needs. The Ford Foundation New Delhi office has been supporting this type of work for many years, dating back to our grant making around "citizen report cards" in Bangalore. Today, in addition to funding grantees that promote social audits, we support efforts to help the Indian government use the tool to monitor citizen satisfaction with public services at the local, state and national levels.

Published in The New York Times

Indian State Empowers Poor to Fight Corruption

December 2, 2010 By Lydia Polgreen

NAGARKURNOOL, India — The village bureaucrat shifted from foot to foot, hands clasped behind his back, beads of sweat forming on his balding head. The eyes of hundreds of wiry village laborers, clad in dusty lungis, were fixed upon him.

A group of auditors, themselves villagers, read their findings. A signature had been forged for the delivery of soil to rehabilitate farmland. The soil had never arrived, and about $4,000 was missing. The bureaucrat, a low-level field assistant who uses the single name Sreekanth, was suspected of stealing it.

"I am a very rightful person," he declared. But the presiding official would have none of it. He ordered that the money be recovered and that Mr. Sreekanth be promptly disciplined.

That simple verdict was part of a sweeping experiment in grass-roots democracy in rural India aimed at ensuring that the benefits of government programs for the poor actually go to the poor.

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