Not Just an Accountant Quotes

“Today, for India, development is not an option—it is a necessity. The lives and livelihoods of far too many people are at stake. Development cannot be sustainable unless it is premised on an edifice of transparency, accountability and ethical governance.”
― Vinod Rai, Not Just an Accountant: The Diary of the Nation's Conscience Keeper

“Benjamin Franklin once said, ‘If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
― Vinod Rai, Not Just an Accountant: The Diary of the Nation's Conscience Keeper

“Accountability and transparency, the two cardinal principles of good governance in a democratic setup, depend, for their observance, on how well the public audit function is discharged.”
― Vinod Rai, Not Just an Accountant: The Diary of the Nation's Conscience Keeper

“Excellence requires no major effort. It merely has to become a habit. All this requires is will, an enabling mindset, simple innovation of processes, and an insistence on timeliness. If”
― Vinod Rai, Not Just an Accountant: The Diary of the Nation's Conscience Keeper

“We excel in cut-and-paste solutions. We make promises and provide quick fixes to tide over the crisis at hand, thereby abandoning long-term objectives. We also seem to keep widening the threshold of our tolerance. We see enormous wrong, abysmally high levels of corruption, but accept these as necessary evils and refuse to raise a voice against them. We need to ask ourselves not only why we choose to live with mediocrity, but also when we plan to stand up and say, enough is enough. I daresay—and I am relieved to see this in my lifetime—such change is on its way; we see welcome signs, particularly from GenNext.”
― Vinod Rai, Not Just an Accountant: The Diary of the Nation's Conscience Keeper

“The coal story is a classic example of how those entrusted with safeguarding the nation’s natural resources allowed it to be frittered away to agencies who were neither capable of exploiting the resources nor had the intent to do so. In the process, they lost the licenses which were later cancelled by the court. Power generation—the avowed objective—fell by the wayside and, finally, it was the economy that suffered by being deprived of that critical input which would have been the engine for growth.”
― Vinod Rai, Not Just an Accountant: The Diary of the Nation's Conscience Keeper

“While the administration is the expending agency of governmental resources, audit is merely the validation agency providing comfort not only to the government but also to the common man that the money extracted from him (as taxation) has been efficiently spent.”
― Vinod Rai, Not Just an Accountant: The Diary of the Nation's Conscience Keeper

“Anyone can criticize, condemn and complain…and most fools do.’ It”
― Vinod Rai, Not Just an Accountant: The Diary of the Nation's Conscience Keeper