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Argues that social auditing has a key importance as there is a growing awareness among corporate sector enterprises that every such enterprise should contribute towards the social goals. Attempts to assess the social performance of a corporate enterprise (Steel Authority of India Limited) in terms of costs incurred by the enterprise considered against the benefits to the recipients. There is need to have regular audit of social accounts on the basis of which the comparative social performance of the corporate sector can be studied. The concept of social audit should be extended to the activities relating to the employees, the environment, the society and the products. There is need to develop a useful social reporting framework to ensure the effectiveness of the social audit programme in the corporate sector which in turn can contribute positively to society at large.

Government of India has introduced various schemes for the uplift of the deprived section of the urban poor. As a result, the proportion of India’s poor with respect to total population has dropped in both urban and rural areas, but then again, the absolute number of the urban poor is growing. Therefore, this article tries to analyse the utilization pattern of credit availed through various credit expansion avenues by the urban poor households, thereafter examining its impact on poverty alleviation at different levels. Snowball sampling method was used to collect data from 598 respondents living in the most populous cities of Punjab and the union territory (UT) of Chandigarh using the references of registered deprived urban poor, who are continuously being recorded and monitored by top non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and banks. Apart from descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis was used to categorize the utilization pattern and poverty alleviation dimensions into the valid factors. Finally, structural equation modelling (SEM) was employed to test the proposed hypothesis. The study found that the productive utilization of credit availed by the Economic Weaker Section (EWS) of the urban poor through various government credit schemes is highly associated with poverty alleviation at individual level (β = 0.55 and p = 0.000) followed by that at regional (β = 0.29 and p = 0.009) and community levels (β = 0.18, and p = 0.001). Social structure of the families is found to be an important deciding factor in how productively a household channelizes its loan amount or grants to move out of poverty and to become self-reliant. The article is limited to only government-backed credit expansion schemes for the EWS of the urban poor residing in the most populous areas of Punjab and Chandigarh. The development of the evaluation model is expected to lead towards better implementation of government credit schemes for the EWS of the urban poor, which would be practically helpful in policymaking. Also, the development of suggestive measures is expected to complement effective, efficient and more cohesive implementation of government schemes for the urban poor, which would be socially more sustainable. With policy emphasis in recent times for the urban poor, the topic is of utmost importance for research.

The human resource valuation system cannot be considered to be a complete system of accounting unless it is followed by an equally competent system of auditing. Application or use of human resource accounting, therefore, must also be followed by a separate HR audit to ascertain whether or not the performance of the managers has been true and fair in the overall interests of the organization they serve. The application and usefulness of human resource valuation depends on the future efforts and experiments to be made by practising managers, accountants and academicians. It also needs support from the professional bodies and government. In the absence of human resource valuation, the management may not realize the negative effects of certain programmes aimed at improving profits in the short run. Such programmes may result in decreased value of human assets due to a fall in productivity levels, high labour turnover and low morale. Audit of human resources could help in finding out the efficiency of every segment. Human resource audit could enable the appraisal of the performance of various managers. The basic function and management of human resources is also greatly facilitated. Hence human resource valuation and audit activity could be helpful in improving the efficiency of human resources in the changing business scenario.