While all of India is talking of corruption and chargesheets at the highest echelons of national and state governments, an initiative gathers steam in a corner of Rajasthan to demand and secure transparency of development works at the village level.
The root of all corruption in the villages is the freedom with which village officials can falsify bills, vouchers, daily wage registers and attendance books. Because the system is so corrupt, because there is no accountability and no fear of being caught and suspended, every year millions of rupees of funds earmarked for building schools, dispensaries, houses, drinking water schemes, planting saplings in forest land and construction of dams, anicuts and community centres go into the pockets of gram sevaks (village workers), patwaris (village clerks) and village level officials in league with touts and politicians. This is the situation in all the South Asian regions, without exception, where governments have taken the responsibility to deliver development schemes to the poor in villages.
Good governance has now become a global issue and a matter of concern for those giving development aid. The top-most priority is to minimise corruption. When he toured South Asia recently, the World Bank President himself minced no words in declaring that aid projects would be stopped if there was enough evidence to prove funds have been wasted or cases of corruption have been proved. A decade ago, such public statements would have been unthinkable.
For all the glib talk of the right to information in India, however, today no villager can walk up to a government official and demand details of expenditure regarding how much the government has spent in his own village. This is because, simply put, he has no rights. He cannot ask for bills, vouchers and ´muster rolls´ because no government order exists to allow him to do so. Without the villager empowered to monitor grassroots projects, therefore, millions of dollars of support from institutions like the World Bank, UNDP and others disappear every year on the way to South Asia´s rural societies.