The New Indian Express: Chennai:
Tuesday, January 28, 2014.
Why can’t we,
the people, demand our government to produce financial statements (quarterly or
yearly) for their city’s corporation or any other government institution and
share it with the public? That’s called transparency and that’s the answer to
good city governance, says Ramesh Ramanathan, founder Janaagraha Centre for
citizenship and democracy in Bangalore.
He was in
Chennai to deliver the second Narasimhan Memorial lecture organised by the
Institute of Public Auditors of India, recently.
Focusing on
good governance in cities, one of the most complex issues, his suggestions were
targeting the government and demanding answers to the most pertinent questions.
“There are
many complex issues involved in the city. All those can be addressed by
embracing the principle of disclosure in our city governments’ finances. If we
could get a robust system of city’s budgeting and financial reporting, we can
have significant benefits in terms of city’s governance and accountability,”
said Ramesh, who is actively involved in such public-government interaction
through Janagraha in Bangalore.
He suggested
that people make use of the Right to Information (RTI) Act which would force
the government to perform well by drawing parallels to the revolutionary
activities by the AAP that has brought in several changes in government, which
could not be fathomed out a decade ago.
“But all
these should involve partnership and participation of the public and the
government, which has to put in 90 per cent of the effort,” he said, mentioning
the most important role played by NGOs which can give more insights in good
governance.
He pointed
out that to attain all these, one had to embrace technology.
“If we don’t
want to settle for status quo, we have to attain what is now called the radical
transparency that can be achieved by embracing the power of technology,” he
said. N Vittal, former Central Vigilance Commissioner, was also present.
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