Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Why We Need Transparency in Governance

10 Key Facts About Transparency that is available in USA

• Transparency requires listing all government expenditures online in an easily searchable database, providing the details of every tax Rupee spent. Ideal transparency websites provide a complete, itemized, and clear description of all expenditures, including but not limited to all contracts, vendors, and grants. All expenditures would have a detailed account of the payment’s purpose and who authorized the payment.

• Transparency fosters accountability in government.

• Increased public access to and understanding of government spending instills greater public confidence in elected officials.

• Transparency brings clarity and sunshine to the characteristically opaque process of government spending.

• Transparency serves as an x-ray machine, allowing people to look into the details of the budget books and understand where their tax dollars go – and to whom.

• Transparency implementation costs at the state level have varied, with most programs having minimal to low fiscal impact.  The benefits of transparency quickly make the cost worthwhile, and in the Internet age, there is no excuse to not post expenditures and financial data online.

• Transparency Laws are better than a Army of RTI activists, who waste their energy and sometimes life in searching for information, which should have been available without demand.

• Transparency alleviates the paper-heavy, inefficient File process, eliminates the unnecessary steps involved with Files, and allows the public to go right to the source.  This makes life simpler for all parties involved – including the government.

• Transparency offers a simple, effective, low-cost tool to put the government back on track and back into the hands of the citizens government ought to serve.

• Implementing transparency at all Five levels of government, whether in Centre, State, District, Taluk (or Corporation) and Panchayat , does not demand great effort; it demands basic respect for communities and taxpayers funding government operation.

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