Time for a Citizen-Led Financial Audit System in India to bring Transparency
Every election in India follows a predictable script. A new government comes to power and immediately accuses the previous administration of leaving behind empty coffers, hidden liabilities, financial mismanagement, or corruption. The outgoing government responds with counter-allegations, claiming the accusations are politically motivated. In the end, citizens are left confused, with little awareness of what the financial facts are, of the country or of the State. When these things happen consistently, they do present an important issue before the public: why have the management of public money levied on and paid by the population kept out of their reach?
In today's digital era, where individuals can track bank transactions, online purchases, and investments in real time on their mobile phones, governments still operate with limited financial transparency. Public expenditure is often buried in technical documents, delayed audit reports, and inaccessible bureaucratic systems. Democracy demands accountability to the people, and every rupee payment by the government should be transparent and traceable to the people, as it happens.
India already possesses the foundation for such a transformation through the Public Financial Management System (PFMS), a digital platform used by government departments to monitor fund flow and expenditure. But the next step should be far more ambitious. Every Indian citizen should be able to securely log into a public transparency portal using Aadhaar or PAN credentials and analyse government spending at national, state, district, and local levels.
Imagine the power of such a system. A villager could check how much money was sanctioned for a drinking water project or road construction in the panchayat. Parents could verify allocations made to local government schools. People in towns and cities could understand the government spending on trash collection, street repairs, health, or transportation. Independent researchers, journalists, students, and civil society could conduct their own research on spending patterns and identify inefficiencies or irregularities. Opposition parties or audits, though important, would no longer be the sole means of achieving public accountability; it would be ongoing and democratic, carried out by the people.
With the help of technology, this has become possible. The case of Aadhaar authentication, UPI transactions, DBT, GST systems, online governance platforms, and many more initiatives have already proven India's digital prowess. Such a system of public expenditure transparency can be part of this developing digital landscape.
Today, the area where the challenge lies is not in technology; it is in politics-how not to. Technology today is not the problem: political will. The data need to be presented in a simple, user-friendly way to make their meaning clear to ordinary citizens. Government spending shouldn't come off as a maze-like accounting sheet, complete with codes. Instead, citizens should have access to interactive dashboards, visual charts, maps, and regional language interfaces. Artificial intelligence tools could even allow citizens to ask simple questions such as: "How much money was spent on healthcare in my district this year?" or "Which infrastructure projects in my constituency are delayed?" Such simplification would democratise financial understanding and encourage informed public participation. Such transparency would yield enormous payoffs. First, there would be a marked decrease in corruption. If there is no hiding money from the government, from politicians or from contractors and officials, it becomes much harder for them to use it to their own benefit. The transparency itself is a disincentive. Secondly, it will make governance more efficient by revealing increases in project costs, ghost beneficiaries, delays and duplicate expenditures.
Citizens were even given the opportunity to include images and field observations to verify if the projects posted as "completed" exist on the ground. Thirdly, it would re-establish the public trust in democratic institutions. The majority of citizens today feel alienated from governance because of the financing transactions that take place out of sight. Open financial systems would also give the governments that actually deliver on efficiency the chance compelling the politicians to do so by producing evidence. Honest administration would be more credible and inefficiency, or corruption would be more difficult to be camouflaged. Safeguards are, of course, required here. Restricted access to sensitive national security expenditures might be required, and data pertaining to beneficiaries of personal expenditure should be protected to safeguard privacy. But the vast bulk of public spending, which includes spending on roads, schools, hospitals, social welfare, infrastructure, public administration and the like, has a perfectly legitimate claim to be made known to the population. Most importantly, transparency should not be based on the political party which governs. Necessary to be enacted in robust laws and autonomous entities of monitoring and supervision. Democracy does not thrive by being elected every five years. Democracy has to be accountable between elections as well.
Public money belongs to the people. Therefore, public audit should also belong to the people. If India can make financial transparency a citizen's right rather than a bureaucratic privilege, it can become one of the world's most accountable democracies. In such a system, political accusations after elections would matter far less because the truth about public finance would already be permanently visible in the public domain.
The writer is the Dean -Academic Affairs, Garden City University, Bengaluru and an adjunct faculty at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore; Views presented are personal.
