Public Accountability

In one line

Public accountability means that everybody who exercises public power must be answerable for how they used it, to somebody, by some process, with some consequence.

In the words a student can write in an exam: public accountability is the principle that the holders of public office and public power are answerable to the public for the exercise of that power, and it is secured in India through a set of overlapping mechanisms: political accountability to the legislature through ministerial responsibility, questions and parliamentary committees; financial accountability through the Comptroller and Auditor General and the Public Accounts Committee; legal accountability through judicial review, the writs, and the liability of the State in tort and contract; institutional accountability through the Lokpal, the Lokayuktas, the Central Vigilance Commission and the Prevention of Corruption Act 1988; and public accountability in the direct sense through the Right to Information Act 2005 and a free press.

The three questions accountability asks

Any account of accountability must answer three questions, and structuring an answer around them is what turns a list into an argument.

1. Accountable to whom? The legislature, the courts, a specialised body, or the public directly.
2. Accountable for what? Legality, financial regularity, efficiency, propriety, or policy.
3. With what consequence? Nothing at all, a report, quashing of the decision, compensation, dismissal, or prosecution.

A mechanism that answers the first two but not the third is weak, and most of the criticism of Indian accountability machinery is at that point.

The mechanisms

1. Political accountability

Ministerial responsibility. By Articles 75(3) and 164(2) the Council of Ministers is collectively responsible to the House of the People and to the State legislative assembly respectively. Individually, a minister answers for the department. The instruments are questions, calling attention motions, adjournment motions, debates and the ultimate sanction of a vote of no confidence.

Its weakness should be stated plainly. Collective responsibility with a disciplined majority means the sanction is rarely applied, and a minister answers for the department's policy rather than for an individual officer's decision affecting an individual citizen.

Parliamentary committees are the working part of this machinery and are treated in [Congressional and Parliamentary Committees].

2. Financial accountability

The Comptroller and Auditor General, appointed under Article 148, audits the accounts of the Union and the States, and by Article 151 his reports are laid before Parliament and the State legislatures. Those reports go to the Public Accounts Committee, which examines them and reports to the House.

This is the strongest continuous accountability mechanism in India for money, and its weakness is that it operates after the expenditure and its reports depend on the House and the Government acting on them.

3. Legal accountability

The whole of Modules II and III. Judicial review of rules and of discretion; natural justice; the writs in [Judicial Remedies against Administrative Arbitrariness: the Writs]; and the liability of the State in tort and contract in the chapters that follow.