NREGA 'Social Audit' Padayatra - 1

Okay lots of detail and background needed here.

I already wrote a little about what NREGA is about.
It turns out that they are some good officials in government, who care that this project should be implemented well. In this case the relevant person is Mr. Raju who I already blogged briefly about. So he decided that it would be a good idea to do a 'social audit' to see how well the program is doing. A 'social audit' entails having a village meeting with all the villagers and going over the work done in the program and finding out by direct cross-verification with the villagers is stuff is happening as expected. The social audit would require a massive effort if its to be done in every village, so as a compromise its done in sort of a representative sample of villages. In Anantapur it was done by taking active help from NGOs as a third party otherwise the government is not very good at policing itself. And the social audit is structured as a padayatra where a group of people (NGO workers, other local organization workers, outside people) walk from village to village during the course of 6 days and each day do the audit at one village. In this way about 400 (0r 600, I got conflicting numbers) villages of Anantapur district were covered over the course of the week from 2nd to 9th September. The government officials were given strict instructions to cooperate fully and since their big boss Raju was behind this project, they had to take it seriously. The idea for this social audit came from Rajasthan where a similar thing was done in Dungarpur district by MKSS and other groups. Timbaktu collective covered 18 villages in 3 mandals as their coverage.
Pulling this social audit thing together was not an easy thing, as NGOs don't always work together well and have strong ideological stances etc. Finally people pulled together and made it happen but it could have been more effective (it *was* quite effective as it was) if the NGOs worked better together. I heard a lot about some of the friction arguments, although I didn't see it first hand. It was an excellent education in interpersonal interactions to see how even NGOs have trouble working together.

I started off expecting to do a lot of documentation work for the audit but as the situation evolved I did very little. People were learning how to do the audit properly on the job, and it ended up with me just accompanying Mary as she visited various places and talked to various people. I did some odd bits of work here and there that were quite useful but for the most part tagged along with Mary, absorbed a lot, and acted as her sounding board. It was quite fun !

===
PS: I added a photo to a previous post about our anniversary