GS4 · 10 marks · 150 words

Traditional forms of state-led accountability, also characterised as vertical and horizontal channels of accountability, are increasingly found to be inadequate, and a myriad of multi-stakeholder and bottom-up citizen directed approaches have come to the fore, to supplement or supplant them. Discuss with illustrations.

Answered by 8 toppers · CSE 2023–2024

Accountability and Ethical GovernanceProbity in GovernanceTransparency and InformationCivil Service ValuesCitizens Charters

Syllabus: Public/Civil service values and Ethics in Public administration: Status and problems; ethical concerns and dilemmas in government and private institutions; laws, rules, regulations and conscience as sources of ethical guidance; accountability and ethical governance; strengthening of ethical and moral values in governance; ethical issues in international relations and funding; corporate governance.

How toppers approached it

From 5 of the 8 answers · about 120 words · 60% drew a diagram.

Opening

  • A definition80%
  • No separate opening20%

Body

  • Points and prose80%
  • Points20%

Close

  • No separate close60%
  • A way forward40%

The toppers’ answers

Aditya SrivastavaAIR 1 · CSE 2023 · 157 wordsTheir whole copy

Opening

Accountability mechanisms have traditionally been either upwards to the boss or horizontal as CAG, etc.

Body · points and prose

However they had their lacunae

  1. Lack of people centricity of imposed accountability norms.

  2. Ivory tower syndrome

  3. Top-down approach of accountability stifles innovation.

  4. Lack of capacity of horizontal measures → lack of enough auditors with CAG

  5. Collective collusion leads to violation of accountability.

All this calls for newer methods of accountability as

→ bottom up accountability,

  • Social audit in MNREGA → very successful in weeding "ghost" beneficiary
  • gram sabha planning and involvement in EIA/SIA → trust and demand based accountability

→ multistakeholder approach

  • environment as stakeholder → uphold ecocentric accountability
    • Eg. Polluter pays (in plastic pollution)
  • people as equal stakeholder ↓
    • prevented leakage of disaster funds in Kosi basin

Close · a way forward

Need is to diversify the accountability hierarchy for more effective good governance and weeding out all notorious elements via full transparency

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