Accountability

🎯 How This Word Works in UPSC Writing

The obligation of those exercising public power to answer for it and face consequences. The typology that organises answers has three axes. Vertical accountability runs from government to citizens, through elections, the Right to Information and a free press. Horizontal accountability runs between state institutions, through the Comptroller and Auditor General, the judiciary, the Lokpal and parliamentary committees. Social accountability works through direct citizen mechanisms, of which the social audit institutionalised under MGNREGA is the most developed Indian instance. Two further distinctions carry marks. Answerability, the duty to explain, is only half of accountability; enforceability, the power to impose a consequence, is the other, and a system with the first alone generates explanation without correction. And accountability for process differs from accountability for outcome, since an official may observe every rule and still deliver nothing.