 "The Bright Side: An informed vote")
The 2014 Lok Sabha election was the world’s largest election ever, with a record voter turnout of 66.38 per cent. The statistics might be impressive, but is that enough? A lone woman living in a small flat in a middle-class neighbourhood in South Delhi doesn’t think so. Instead, she is raising pertinent questions about electoral behaviour. “Are our voting choices as informed as they ought to be?” asks Anjali Bhardwaj, founder of Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS). “Do we know how many Parliament sessions our MPs have attended or how they’ve utilised the funds at their disposal?” Bhardwaj’s Delhi-based citizens’ group has been using the Right to Information Act to create performance report cards for the capital’s elected representatives.
The idea of report cards for politicians is unusual, but does it impact people’s lives? I walk through Begumpur, a sprawling slum in Delhi’s Malviya Nagar, with Asha Devi, a resident, to find out. Until some years ago, there used to be one tap in the slum, with an hour of water supply every midnight. “We would stand all night in a queue for water,” says Asha Devi. The slum residents went from the MP to the MLA and then to the councillor pleading for help, to no avail. “Then, SNS showed us our MLA’s report card and we discovered that her funds for water-related amenities were being spent on ornamental fountains!” she exclaims. Asha Devi, along with other residents and SNS activists, then went to the MLA, brandished the report card and got her to sanction a water pipeline for Begumpur.
The idea of measuring political performance came to Bhardwaj in 2006. “We were using the RTI Act to help people obtain ration cards and better quality of ration back then,” she says. SNS activists soon noticed a strange pattern in their community meetings. “Every time there were elections, people from the slums would stop coming,” she recalls. It turned out, around election time, a rumour about slum demolitions (probably circulated by candidates) would start and people would stay home fearing the worst. SNS asked for a list of slums to be demolished and found that none of the slums they worked with were on it. This made them realise how vulnerable this lack of knowledge about the functioning of elected representatives made them. Pushpa Lata, a slum-dweller and SNS worker, says, “We decided to hold accountable not just babus (bureaucrats), but also netas (politicians).”
Pushpa Lata was among the first in her community to file an RTI application seeking the performance details of her MLA and councillor. Others followed, undeterred by the government’s stonewalling. When SNS eventually received the information, the victory felt pyrrhic. Swathed in bureaucratese and acronyms, the information was incomprehensible. “There were innumerable entries like ‘P/L of CCR’,” says Bhardwaj with a laugh. After a retired official of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi decoded the documents (the acronym, it emerged, stands for “providing and laying of cement concrete roads”), SNS demanded that the government should suo motu disclose information about how MLAs spend the funds, instead of people having to ask for it. “We asked for this information to be displayed on public boards in Hindi,” she says. In February 2011, the Central Information Commission ruled in SNS’s favour; today, such information boards have been placed in all 70 constituencies of Delhi.
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab of Massachusetts Institute of Technology has assessed how this information impacts voter behaviour. In a field experiment during the 2008 Delhi state elections, researchers compared voter behaviour of a group armed with information about the legislators’ performance, financial and criminal records with another group that had no information. They found a 3.5 per cent increase in turnout in slums where report cards were disseminated. They also found that better-performing incumbents received more votes. In fact, attending the ration and police vigilance committee meetings contributed to a 7 per cent increase in the incumbent’s vote share.
SNS’s next plan is a nationwide ranking of state legislatures for transparency and accountability. “Of course we’ll keep working on report cards, but we’ll lobby for increased suo motu disclosures from the government,” says Bhardwaj. “Moreover, we’re demanding that political parties be brought under the RTI Act — which, expectedly, they’re opposing!”
SNS’s report cards show that with the right information, even the illiterate can be effective voters and citizens. “By making political performance transparent, these give citizens the power to hold politicians accountable every five years when they face elections,” says Bhardwaj. “An empowering idea for us all, no?”
The idea of report cards for politicians is unusual, but does it impact people’s lives? I walk through Begumpur, a sprawling slum in Delhi’s Malviya Nagar, with Asha Devi, a resident, to find out. Until some years ago, there used to be one tap in the slum, with an hour of water supply every midnight. “We would stand all night in a queue for water,” says Asha Devi. The slum residents went from the MP to the MLA and then to the councillor pleading for help, to no avail. “Then, SNS showed us our MLA’s report card and we discovered that her funds for water-related amenities were being spent on ornamental fountains!” she exclaims. Asha Devi, along with other residents and SNS activists, then went to the MLA, brandished the report card and got her to sanction a water pipeline for Begumpur.
The idea of measuring political performance came to Bhardwaj in 2006. “We were using the RTI Act to help people obtain ration cards and better quality of ration back then,” she says. SNS activists soon noticed a strange pattern in their community meetings. “Every time there were elections, people from the slums would stop coming,” she recalls. It turned out, around election time, a rumour about slum demolitions (probably circulated by candidates) would start and people would stay home fearing the worst. SNS asked for a list of slums to be demolished and found that none of the slums they worked with were on it. This made them realise how vulnerable this lack of knowledge about the functioning of elected representatives made them. Pushpa Lata, a slum-dweller and SNS worker, says, “We decided to hold accountable not just babus (bureaucrats), but also netas (politicians).”
Pushpa Lata was among the first in her community to file an RTI application seeking the performance details of her MLA and councillor. Others followed, undeterred by the government’s stonewalling. When SNS eventually received the information, the victory felt pyrrhic. Swathed in bureaucratese and acronyms, the information was incomprehensible. “There were innumerable entries like ‘P/L of CCR’,” says Bhardwaj with a laugh. After a retired official of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi decoded the documents (the acronym, it emerged, stands for “providing and laying of cement concrete roads”), SNS demanded that the government should suo motu disclose information about how MLAs spend the funds, instead of people having to ask for it. “We asked for this information to be displayed on public boards in Hindi,” she says. In February 2011, the Central Information Commission ruled in SNS’s favour; today, such information boards have been placed in all 70 constituencies of Delhi.
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab of Massachusetts Institute of Technology has assessed how this information impacts voter behaviour. In a field experiment during the 2008 Delhi state elections, researchers compared voter behaviour of a group armed with information about the legislators’ performance, financial and criminal records with another group that had no information. They found a 3.5 per cent increase in turnout in slums where report cards were disseminated. They also found that better-performing incumbents received more votes. In fact, attending the ration and police vigilance committee meetings contributed to a 7 per cent increase in the incumbent’s vote share.
SNS’s next plan is a nationwide ranking of state legislatures for transparency and accountability. “Of course we’ll keep working on report cards, but we’ll lobby for increased suo motu disclosures from the government,” says Bhardwaj. “Moreover, we’re demanding that political parties be brought under the RTI Act — which, expectedly, they’re opposing!”
SNS’s report cards show that with the right information, even the illiterate can be effective voters and citizens. “By making political performance transparent, these give citizens the power to hold politicians accountable every five years when they face elections,” says Bhardwaj. “An empowering idea for us all, no?”
For details, visit www.snsindia.org
This is a fortnightly column on little-known NGOs. Next up, the story of Sanjay Van: how an urban wasteland was transformed into an oasis of biodiversity in the heart of Delhi through the efforts of a single man
This is a fortnightly column on little-known NGOs. Next up, the story of Sanjay Van: how an urban wasteland was transformed into an oasis of biodiversity in the heart of Delhi through the efforts of a single man