The Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) shall soon assume the presidency of the Asian Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (ASOSAI) for the period 2024-2027 and will host the 16th Assembly of the ASOSAI in New Delhi from Sept 21 – 27 September. Representing forty-eight countries, the ASOSAI is one of the seven regional organisations of the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI). The first meeting of the ASOSAI was held in New Delhi in May 1979, with CAG of India as the Chair. Since then, CAG of India, as a permanent member of the Governing Board of ASOSAI, has chaired the organisation twice, in 1994-1996 and 2012-2015. As the ASOSAI members once again return to New Delhi where the Association roots were planted, CAG of India has geared up to provide multiple platforms for discussions and exchange of ideas on the prevailing public financial management scenarios across Asia including the opportunities and challenges from the emerging technologies.
Asia is home to 60 per cent of the world’s population and the continent is characterised by heterogeneity in political and socio-economic systems, including some of the most advanced countries in the world as also those that are still developing. Asian Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) represent a formidable group of public auditing institutions of the highest calibre and stature.
A professional forum like the ASOSAI has a key role in promoting collaboration among the SAIs through knowledge sharing and capacity building. At the global level, ASOSAI enables a strong articulation of the voices and views of SAIs of developing countries and helps them participate in setting the terms of discourse and identifying priorities. It seeks to specifically influence the process of setting relevant international standards for public sector auditing, initiating strategic partnerships with the UN and other international oversight bodies, and extending peer to peer support in the field of public sector auditing.
Being one of the eleven original members of ASOSAI, the CAG of India has been an influential voice in the organisation. Be it on issues of climate change or auditing SDGs, SAI India has led from the front in shaping the consensus in favour of strengthening the role of SAIs in enabling governments of the day to provide accountable and transparent governance. SAI India has strategically utilised its expertise and experience as the chair of the Knowledge Sharing Committee (KSC) of INTOSAI, to mentor various working groups within ASOSAI such as the ASOSAI Working Group on Environmental Auditing, Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals and Working Group on Crisis Management Audit. These working groups cater to the capacity building requirements of member SAIs by conducting research projects on relevant themes, organising workshops for public sector auditors and by bringing out guidance notes and good practices that are helpful to the member SAIs in auditing technical subjects. SAI India also provides important support to the ASOSAI’s efforts by deputing officers as subject experts, resource persons and mentors for the ASOSAI supported capacity development programmes. SAI India has also contributed significantly to knowledge creation and dissemination within the Asian community of SAIs in its role as the Chair of the Editorial Board of The Asian Journal of Government Audit, a much sought after professional magazine for government auditors, published since 1983.
Recognising the need to debate and engage with stakeholders on emerging issues of global concern, SAI India, as the host of 16th ASOSAI Assembly, has chosen “Digital Public Infrastructure and Gender Divide – Issues of inclusion and accessibility” as the theme for the Symposium that shall be part of the ASOSAI Assembly events.
Both digital public infrastructure and matters of gender divide are the issues that resonate deeply within Asia. According to the IMF, Asia accounted for 60 percent of patents in digital and computer technologies right before the pandemic, up 40 per cent from two decades earlier. The continent is marked by two of the world’s most populous countries also acknowledged for their technological might, alongside pioneers of technology like Japan and South Korea.
Starting with enormous digital infrastructure being created for cashless payments during the pandemic, the region has witnessed massive growth of digital public infrastructure (DPI) for the financial ecosystem, digital identity and data exchange in tandem with banking networks. More and more countries, especially in the developing world are leveraging core components of DPI for promoting financial inclusion and economic development. Asia has also seen the innovative and highly imaginative use of DPI in enabling greater access to public health, education and other public services. These emerging technologies and their use in the delivery of public goods and services has the potential to unshackle the lives of those marginalised and pave the way for their participation as equal citizens.
The technological head start notwithstanding, the region’s digital divide is huge and equitable DPI access is of particular significance especially with 48 per cent of the Asian population being female. While access to cutting-edge digital technologies is highly uneven within countries, and across populations, particularly striking is the wide disparity in the extent to which women have access to technology. Women face a number of challenges in terms of lack of formal identification, lower digital literacy, limited access to smartphones, mobile network, women agents and formal credit, as also socio-cultural issues impacting their path to empowerment and well-being.
SAI India is of the view that the engagement with the subject of digital public infrastructure and gender divide will undoubtedly enable public auditors to assess the effectiveness of the use of digital public infrastructure and identify its social and economic outcomes. This is in step with the changing focus of public auditing beyond the traditional oversight of public expenditure. As SAIs increasingly take a broader, more comprehensive view on reliability, effectiveness, efficiency and economy of policies and programmes of governments, there is a growing acceptance of the need to assess outcomes of governmental action. Recommendations of SAIs are thus emerging as key inputs for policy makers as these provide guidelines for informed course correction and modification based on evidence-based reporting. Thus the Symposium holds the potential to contribute to the larger policy formulation and implementation exercise by Asian Governments involving the use of DPI.
This initiative by the CAG of India is in continuation of the groundbreaking consensus reached by the G20 Digital Economy Ministers in 2023 under India’s presidency to shape digital public infrastructure of the future, as an accelerator of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). DPI, as defined by the G20 New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration, “is a set of shared digital systems that are secure and interoperable, built on open technologies, to deliver equitable access to public and/or private services at a societal scale". The New Delhi Declaration with its emphasis on the social aspect of DPI was a marked change from the technology-led parlance that has dominated the DPI discourse.
Building synergies with this thought process, the theme of accessibility, equity and inclusiveness in DPI shall define the tone of SAI India’s role as the Chair of ASOSAI. SAI India hopes to nudge the Asian public audit community to play its part in assessing digital public infrastructure so as to bridge the gender divide. It seeks to showcase and share successful experiments in the policy and auditing realms that have helped unlock the potential of DPI in effecting greater inclusion and accessibility and steer the attention of the Asian community of Supreme Audit Institutions to an emerging and promising area of interface between governance and emerging technologies.
Mainstreaming the dialogue on social aspects of inclusion and accessibility of Digital Public Infrastructure through its leadership role in the international arena will be a valuable contribution of the CAG of India.
Geeta Menon is Additional Deputy CAG and Shefali Srivastava Andaleeb is Director General in the Office of the CAG of India. Views are personal.
