The RTI Story: Power to the People

Roy, MKSS Collection

• Publisher: Roli Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9788193704912
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de desarrollo global

Aruna Roy resigned from the IAS in 1975 to work with peasants and workers in rural Rajasthan. In 1990 she helped co-found the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS). The MKSS struggles in the mid 90s for wages and other rights gave birth to the now celebrated Right to Information movement. Aruna continues to be a part of many democratic struggles and campaigns. This book is a collective history that tells the story of how ordinary people can come together and prevail against great odds, to make democracy more meaningful.

THE

RTI

STORY

Aruna Roy resigned from the IAS in 1975 to work with peasants and workers in rural Rajasthan. In 1990 she helped co-found the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS). The MKSS struggles in the mid-90s for wages and other rights gave birth to the now celebrated Right to Information movement. Aruna continues to be a part of many democratic struggles and campaigns.

This book is a collective history that tells the story of how ordinary people can come together and prevail against great odds, to make democracy more meaningful.

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ROLI BOOKS

This digital edition published in 2018

First published in 2018 by

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Copyright © Aruna Roy, 2018

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Dedication

This narrative is dedicated to the many who have paid with their lives, for combating corruption and the arbitrary use of power, by claiming the right to know.

Tribute

This book is a tribute to the large collective, from whose action, determination, memory and records a narrative has emerged. The stories, anecdotes and the common sense of its logic in the pages to come, including the many edited out – which remain anonymous for the time being, because of prosaic things like word limits and the number of pages – are its real authors. We are mere scribes.

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Devdungri: The Beginning

CHAPTER TWO

Sohangarh and the Struggle for Land

CHAPTER THREE

The Concept and Birth of the MKSS

CHAPTER FOUR

The First Hunger Strike, 1990

CHAPTER FIVE

The Bhim Minimum Wages Sammelan

CHAPTER SIX

The Second Hunger Strike, 1991 – A Watershed

CHAPTER SEVEN

Exposing the Myth of the Free and Open Market

CHAPTER EIGHT

Articulating the Demand for Transparency

CHAPTER NINE

MKSS and Public Hearings

CHAPTER TEN

Political Promises and Accountability

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Hamara Paisa Hamara Hisab: Beawar and Jaipur Dharnas, 1996

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Formation of the NCPRI and the Making of the Law

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Process and the Campaign Travel: The Public Hearings

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Rajasthan Divisional Dharnas

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Dharna in Jaipur: May–August, 1997

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

NCPRI and the State Laws

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Second Set of Jan Sunwais

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Rajasthan State Act – An Intermediate Success

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Challenge of Elections

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Public Hearings in Umarwas

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Janawad Jan Sunwai

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Government Enquiry Endorses Janawad Public Hearings

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

NCPRI Convention, Beawar 2001

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Post-Janawad and the Response of the Government of Rajasthan

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Jan Niti Abhiyan

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Freedom of Information Bill, 2002

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Friends and Colleagues in Delhi

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Second NCPRI, 2004

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

RTI Law 2005 and the NAC

CHAPTER THIRTY

RTI Amendments, 2006

In Conclusion

Notes

ANNEXURE I

The Beawar Declaration

ANNEXURE II

The Freedom of Information Bill, 2000

Credits

Index

Foreword

To know is to understand. To understand is to be at peace or – embattled.

To be in ignorance is to stay in the dark. To be in the dark is to stagnate, a condition which the human mind is not meant to be in. Knowledge is fuel, intelligence is energy. The two together, knowledge and intelligence, fuel and energy, race with time, keep step with every condition, every change, every challenge around it. In this talent, or skill, lies the human being’s faculty for survival, for progress and happiness.

For an individual to be in ignorance is to let her or his intelligence run to seed. It is to let the human potential in herself or himself to atrophy. Worse, it is to imperil others dependent on the individual. If such be the dire result of an individual’s ignorance, what of a collectivity of people, a whole peoplehood? For a citizenry to remain in the dark about its selfhood is to forfeit its collective destiny to slavery – the slavery of unknowing.

The struggle for our freedom came from a many-faceted struggle but, chiefly from a struggle against ignorance – of the slavery that British rule meant. Books like Dadabhai Naoroji’s Poverty and Un-British Rule and Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj and several journals like Gandhi’s own Harijan and Young India, Tilak’s Kesari (Marathi), Gokhale’s Mahratta (English), Aurobindo’s Bande Mataram (Bangla), Maulana Azad’s Al Hilal (Urdu), Subramania Bharati’s Vijaya and Bala Bharati (both Tamil) and Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi’s Pratap (Hindi), among others, lifted the veil of India’s unknowing of its political and social bondage. Our leaders were, thus, our teachers, leading us from ignorance to intelligence, from indolence to action, from apathy to energy. And, ultimately, from slavery to freedom.

India’s independence moved us out of the valley of political thraldom and stood us, face to face, overnight, with the realities of our own multiple ills, our enervations and injustices, and the vice-like grip of several hegemonisms which two persons above all others recognized all too well – Mahatma Gandhi and Babasaheb Dr. B.R. Ambedkar.

Even in the few months that were given to him after 15 August 1947, Gandhi strove, tirelessly, sleeplessly, to make provincial governments and the new central government accountable for assuring human rights to riot victims, especially women, getting administrations to provide shelter and supply minimum rations and clothing to the dispossessed. Seeing men, women and children who had left or been driven out of their homes in Delhi unprotected from the rain and the winter’s cold, Gandhi advised the administration on where and to whom blankets needed to be given and if raincoats were hard to find, to provide them stacks of newspapers to spread on the ground so that the women and children among them would not have to lie on the bare and wet earth. All this nudging of the administration he did as an ‘ordinary citizen’.

Babasaheb’s detailed and far-seeing crafting of fundamental rights guaranteeing our rights and p...