Aditi Phadnis: Prising open the doors to the system

BACKSTAGE/ Aruna Roy

Aruna Roy

Aruna Roy is back. The organisation that was launched as a result of a sit-in in 1996 by 400 people in Beawar, a village in Rajasthan's dusty desert, the National Campaign for People's Right to Information has slammed the government's paltry efforts to offer people the right to information as contained in the Right to Information (RTI) Bill passed by the Cabinet earlier this week.

For Roy, who took a great leap into the unknown when she left the IAS in 1975, the draft bill is yet another reminder of the grimness of the struggle for access to information for the very poor.

What is at stake here? Quite a lot, actually. The Right to Know offers an avenue for the ordinary citizen to hold government officials accountable.

To cite an example, activist economist Jean Dreze has found, in a survey, that there is still corruption in famine relief works in Rajasthan, but the scale of corruption has gone down.

This is because Mazdoor Kisan Sangharsh Samiti (MKSS), the body of peasants, workers and landless labourers of which Roy is a member, has managed to make the Rajasthan government enact the Right to Information Act, which makes it mandatory for the government to make public administrative records available for public scrutiny. This has strengthened public vigilance.

Writing about the MKSS information campaign, Roy says: "in demanding transparency the people ask for the right to know what is happening with their money and the right to monitor the working of government servants, a reversal of the traditional pattern where the people are expected to plead before the government.

In the simple act of asking questions, the poor change the power equation more basically than by any other demands they may have made. Unable to deny and unwilling to provide, the system is caught in its own web of deceit and duplicity.

The politicians/officials too are trapped in their own hypocritical but constitutional commitment to answer the questions asked of them. This process helps cut at the root of the feudal suppressive norms, which discourage public questioning."

When seen in this context, it is really not surprising that the draft RTI Bill that Cabinet has cleared is a pale shadow of the original one discussed in the Common Minimum Programme and the National Advisory Council headed by Sonia Gandhi. The very concept threatens the security and position of many pillars of the establishment.

Roy confesses that when she came to Tilonia, in the middle of the Rajasthan desert, she had no idea what a village was like. Nor, she says, did she have any comprehension of a villager's lack of access to information.

Unfortunately, if NGO reactions to the RTI Bill are any indication, Roy is even further away from sensitising the state to the importance of access to information, than she was before she started.

Many movements in India, from the extreme Left wing to the extreme Right wing, have worried and gnawed at the complicated issue of how in a democracy people should relate to the state.

Roy's answer to this question is to lay bare, not just vertical but horizontal linkages of the people to the state by the simple expedient of access to information.

This is a simple, effective and insistent knock on the door of both the bureaucracy and the politician by an ordinary Indian, to be let into the portals of the system that is supposedly erected for him.

Critics of the RTI path to empowerment say there is no positive bias in favour of the poor "" which means that while corporates can use this law to gain access to information they might need, unless there is an Aruna Roy around, the poor will never really be able to get the information they want.

For a Tamilian, married to a Bengali and living in Rajasthan, the picture of India must look very different from the way it does in Delhi or Mumbai.

Roy's rich experience of living in Tilonia, observing gender and caste and its attendant politics in a village and the understanding this has brought to the way Indian state and society function, makes her a walking, talking source on places far, far away from Delhi.