Undoubtedly Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) positions among the most dominant initiative undertaken for the transformation of rural livelihood in India. In India, a lack of accountability is viewed as the key reason behind the failure of most development programs. Most poverty alleviation programs are loaded with inefficiency, absenteeism, incompetence, and corruption. This paper attempts to analyze whether the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is accountable to ordinary residents, and civil society’s role in making the Act viable. In this comparative study on social audits under MGNREGA in selected districts of Rajasthan, an endeavor has been made to analyze the performance of the MGNREGA in term of social audit and to provide suggestions on how to improve the design and implementation of social audits in the state. With the help of the secondary data gathered from three districts – Jaipur, Dausa and Sikar, the study contends that although the documentary evidence demonstrates that social audits are conducted, they actually do not fulfill the main objective of engaging the beneficiaries of the scheme and making the scheme effective. Findings of the study demonstrate that respondents in all three districts are not much aware of the provisions under MGNREGA. The social audit process is undermined by the influence employed by village elites which results in the exclusion of poor laborers for whom the scheme is principally implied. The study has made some suggestions to make the social audit process more participatory by ensuring that it is conducted in an unbiased way.

Keywords: Social Welfare, Poverty Eradication, Social Audit, MGNREGS, MGNREGA.