The agent of change……….Chanpreet Khurana
Vinod Rai, Comptroller and Auditor General of India, wants to do more than just give the apex auditor’s office a cosmetic facelift. Rai is keen to bring the 150-year-old institution up to speed with changes in governance and administration. And if that means asking for the Audit Act of 1971 to be repealed, then so be it, he tells Chanpreet Khurana
He is a perfectionist, and isn’t afraid to roll up his sleeves and pitch in, even get his hands and clothes dirty, literally, if it gets the job done to his satisfaction. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), Vinod Rai, is, by his own admission, ‘chief maali (gardener)’ of the gardens at home and at the spanking new office building of the CAG on Deen Dayal Updhayay Marg in New Delhi.
In his pursuit of perfection, Rai even has a plan of his house and garden on his computer. Each flowerbed is numbered and assessed for the amount of sunlight it receives in the summer and winter months. This helps him decide what to plant in that space. This summer, he plans to grow portulaca, balsam and zinnias in his garden. “I like flowers, but I also keep a vegetable garden to buy peace with the wife,” Rai says.
This hands-on approach is evident in his attitude to work too. “Some of the photos you see in the 2008 report on waste management have been taken by me,” he says. And why are there photos in audit reports that have been traditionally dry and text-heavy, you ask. The photos appear in what are internally called the ‘Noddy books’. “It’s because they are that size,” explains Rai. Typically less than 30 pages long, these books are an attempt by the CAG’s office to reach out to the main stakeholder, ‘the common man in the street’. Reader-friendly and accessible, the attractively-packaged books give the highlights of the full-length report—the audit objectives, methodology, findings and impact—in a capsule form.
As many as 18,000 of these have been printed across six subjects, including the performance audits on waste management, the rural jobs guarantee scheme and the accelerated rural water supply programme. “We couldn’t have spent more than Rs 25 lakh on these books last year,” estimates Rai, adding that even if the expenditure were to go up to Rs 1 crore, he would think it as ‘money well spent’.
It is no coincidence either that the CAG’s office has been undertaking more performance audits of late. Rai says he now wants the office to focus more on outcomes rather than expenditure. “Instead of looking at transactions, I want to look more at performance,” he says, explaining that his focus is not just on how much money flows out of the exchequer to make a purchase, “but the economy and effectiveness of that purchase”. And this also translates into more follow-on audits, he agrees.
In fact, Rai wants to do more than just give the supreme auditor’s office a cosmetic facelift. There’s a generous sprinkling of the words reorient, reengineer, revisit in his conversations. Rai is keen to bring the 150-year-old institution up to speed with the changes in administration. And, if that means asking for the Audit Act of 1971 to be repealed, then so be it.
Frozen in time, the Act fails to capture the changes in the way the state functions. The audit mandate does not, for example, cover gram panchayats, which were introduced as a third tier of government under the 73rd Amendment to the Constitution, the emergence of the public-private partnership model or the devolution of funds for schemes such as the rural health mission through bodies such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
“The Act of ’71 does not contemplate any of these things, so it cannot capture audit through these channels. The audit mandate has not changed and that is why we have proposed to the government a repeal of the old Act and introduction of a new Act,” he says.
But Rai is not waiting till the government heeds his proposal, and effects an alteration accordingly. Instead, he is already leading the change he wants to see in the CAG’s office.
For the environment audit on water pollution that is currently underway, for example, he has enlisted the help of local communities, social activist groups and NGOs—anyone that can augment the local knowledge quotient. The CAG’s office received some 500 letters in response to an advertisement seeking comments and suggestions from the public and social activist groups ahead of the audit. “I am also trying to dovetail social audit into this entire process. We dovetail the local knowledge that they have and the auditors’ domain knowledge that we have (and therefore achieve) more outreach,” he says.
In his over two years in office, Rai has tried to bring a fresh perspective to the way the auditor of the state functions. He has brought 36 years of experience on the executive side to bear and has redrawn the outlines of what the office of the CAG can do to improve governance.
“An auditor looks at everything like a tonga horse—through blinkers,” says Rai. The first order of business, according to Rai, is to fix up the public image of the auditors. He explains that he wants to break away from the image of auditors as ‘fault finders’. And, Rai plans to do this by tweaking the model just a little.
National schemes, he explains, are implemented not at the country level per se, but at the level of the individual states. The auditors then are privy to information about how these schemes are being implemented in the various states and their varying success rates. By simply tweaking the model in favour of a more positive orientation, Rai hopes to kill two birds with one stone.
One, the auditor would acknowledge in his report not just the lacunae in implementation, but also cite when something is done well by an auditee. And two, where such lacunae are noticed, the auditor could supplement that observation with suggestions for improvement drawn from the more successful states. In doing this, the auditors would only be lending the information already at their disposal to ‘sharing of best practices’. According to Rai, this is an important new role for the auditor, “because the auditor is the only one who sees it (programme implementation) across all the states”.
And, while an audit is by definition a sort of stocktaking after the event, there are ways to make the findings more meaningful.
Rai cites the examples of the CAG reports on the Commonwealth Games and the Delhi Metro as successful interventions. In July 2009, the CAG’s office submitted a report to the Prime Minister’s Office and the sports ministry on the lag in the work on venues and infrastructure for the 2010 Games being hosted by New Delhi. The report also sought an explanation for the organising committee almost doubling the revenue it expected would be generated from the Games. Rai points out that if the report had been submitted a year after the Games, it would not have had any impact. This is what Rai calls the ‘concurrent approach’.
Rai remains unfazed by the challenges a slow-changing system can pose. “It’s useless to say I am the best worker, so change the rules for me,” he says. A fitness enthusiast—he plays lawn tennis every morning and enjoys trekking—Rai picks a parallel from the world of sport to explain. “If you are a cricketer, what do you mean by saying I’ll only face spin bowlers and not fast bowlers? If you are good, you have to work in the environment as it obtains.”
The CAG has already to some extent achieved what he set out to do, especially when it comes to redefining the role of the office and the public perception of auditors. After all, the government is now asking the CAG to apply its litmus test to national-level programmes with significant outlays. Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, for example, recently said the state’s auditor should help improve the efficacy of government-run schemes and suggest ways to reduce the fertiliser and food subsidies without hurting the beneficiaries.