Accountability is the daily renewal of consent in a democracy

The American colonies' rallying cry in 1773 was 'no taxation without representation'. The principle is half-remembered today, but its mirror is forgotten. Representation, once granted, must continue to be earned. India holds general elections every five years, but consent in a constitutional democracy is renewed every single day — in question hour, in RTI replies, in CAG audit paragraphs, in parliamentary committee reports, in the work of vigilance commissions. Accountability is not a periodic spectacle reserved for the polling booth. It is the daily renewal of consent. When accountability lapses, democracy continues in form while dying in substance — its institutions intact, its legitimacy slowly draining. Form without substance is the most expensive failure a democracy can suffer, because it deceives both the rulers who issue the decisions and the citizens who must live with them.

Vertical accountability is the most visible kind: citizens above, representatives below. Elections embody it, but they do not exhaust it. The Right to Information Act 2005 is a tool of daily verticality; an Indian citizen can ask a public authority for any record, and the Public Information Officer has 30 days to respond. The Act was not a Delhi invention. It grew out of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan's social audits at Tilonia in the 1990s, where Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey persuaded villagers that the wages recorded in muster rolls had to match the wages paid. The MKSS jan sunwai — the public hearing — read out muster rolls in front of the people whose names were on them. That theatre became statute. The proposed 2024 amendments to the RTI Act, narrowing Section 8(1)(j) to align with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, drew sharp criticism precisely because they threatened to refasten the door social audit had pried open. Approximately 60 lakh RTI applications are filed annually in India; the volume itself is a form of citizen vigilance unmatched anywhere in the developing world.

Horizontal accountability is quieter but structurally indispensable. The Comptroller and Auditor General (Articles 148-151) audits the Union and the States; the Central Vigilance Commission watches probity within executive ministries; the Lokpal, sworn in finally in 2019, addresses corruption at the highest levels; the Election Commission supervises political competition; the National Human Rights Commission monitors abuses of power. Parliamentary Standing Committees scrutinise legislation line by line. The CAG's 2010 reports on the 2G spectrum and coal-block allocations and its 2011 Commonwealth Games audit reshaped public debate and brought down a government in the 2014 elections. In 2024, the Enforcement Directorate's probe into the Maharashtra State Cooperative Bank case demonstrated that horizontal mechanisms can act, although their selectivity remains a fair question. The Supreme Court's February 2024 judgment striking down the Electoral Bonds Scheme as unconstitutional was itself a horizontal-accountability moment — one organ correcting another's overreach.

Digital accountability is the new terrain. The Government e-Marketplace (GeM), launched in August 2016, has digitised public procurement at scale; the Open Government Data Platform offers thousands of datasets; PRAGATI, the Prime Minister's monthly review platform, since 2015 has tracked stuck projects worth lakhs of crores. The JAM trinity — Jan-Dhan, Aadhaar, Mobile — enables Direct Benefit Transfer to be audited against beneficiary lists. The Transparency Portals launched in 2024 publish capital project progress in near-real time. India's Digital Public Infrastructure has become an accountability layer in itself; the architecture that delivers vaccines also delivers visibility about who got how many. CoWIN's pandemic-era certificate trail, the Public Financial Management System's expenditure tracking and the e-Vidhan project for digitising state assemblies all point to the same direction: accountability as a default rather than an exception.

One concern is genuine. Accountability without proportion produces paralysis. Honest civil servants come to fear decisions because every decision becomes potential litigation. The Asha Workers Bonus controversy of 2023, where field officers were investigated for procedural lapses while overall outcomes improved, is a warning. The 2018 amendment to the Prevention of Corruption Act introduced prior-sanction requirements for prosecuting public servants on bona-fide decisions, attempting to draw a line between corruption and judgment-error. Some critics see the amendment as shielding the powerful; others see it as protecting the routine officer. The answer is not less accountability but smarter accountability — distinguishing willful wrong from honest mistake, isolating bad faith from bad luck. The 2024 Department of Personnel and Training reform on time-bound vigilance clearances is a small step in this direction.

The deeper objection is cultural. Accountability is an adversarial instrument in a society still partly comfortable with deference to authority. The CAG paragraph that names a minister, the RTI reply that exposes a contract, the Standing Committee report that contradicts a Cabinet briefing — each requires the courage to be unpopular among the powerful. Institutions can supply the procedure; only people supply the courage. When auditors are transferred, when whistle-blowers are isolated, when committees become rubber stamps, the procedure survives but the practice dies. The Whistle Blowers Protection Act 2014, still awaiting full implementation, illustrates the persistent gap between legislated intent and operational reality. Activists who pursued RTI cases — Lalit Mehta in Jharkhand, Niyamat Ansari in Latehar — have lost their lives. Each death is a measure of how much weight accountability bears in a still-unequal society.

Abraham Lincoln's image of a democracy 'of the people, by the people, for the people' was not a description but an assignment. It is daily work, not a five-year event. That work is necessarily distributed. The journalist who files a follow-up question, the citizen who reads a CAG report, the auditor who refuses to soften a paragraph, the MP who tables a Standing Committee finding, the judge who hears a public-interest petition — each performs one beat of an everyday rhythm. Together they renew the consent that elections only initiate. The architecture of accountability mechanisms is impressive on paper; their cumulative force depends on whether the architecture is used. A republic in which every five years the citizen votes and the other 1,825 days the citizen is silent is a republic that has confused turnout with trust. Accountability is what converts the polling booth into a constant promise rather than a momentary one. Every RTI filed, every committee report read, every CAG paragraph debated is consent renewed — and consent ungiven is the silent verdict that no election cycle can disguise for long.