An Analysis of Social Audit in the District of Purba Medinipur in West Bengal with the Help of Mathematical and Statistical Techniques

Abstract

“If Brazil has its Bolsa Familia and Mexico its Progresa, famous for the schemes for alleviating poverty; India is recently making news internationally. India’s system of social audits, that is, independent but local auditing of social programmes to fight poverty, like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), is attracting world attention”. In the light of this statement, an attempt has been made to do an assessment about the social audit conducted in the District of Purba Medinipore District in the State of West Bengal in this regard. There are two dimensions; in commercial term, social audit may be defined as “assessment of the performance of an organisation for the society as a whole vis-à-vis an assessment of its total responsibility to the society”. This concept of social audit is not applicable in the area of government accounting. In case of government accounting and auditing concept, the performance of the organisation in discharging social needs are not assessed, rather society as a whole is acting as auditor to assess the performance of various projects and schemes undertaken by the government agencies and their impact on the development of the society.