The RTI journey: From rural to digital

The walls were painted a bright yellow. Drawn on them in black were statements of income and expenditure, breaking down figures in meticulous detail with rows and columns stretching across two and sometimes three floors. The paintings weren’t just on the panchayat office walls but even adorned the compound walls of homes, schools and local markets.

It was 10 years ago when I first visited the Vijaypura gram panchayat — a clutch of nine villages in Rajsammand district. Some 280km from Jaipur, it then had a population of 5,000 or so. A cub reporter, I was looking at what had changed in the villages of Rajasthan four years after the Right to Information (RTI) Act was passed in Parliament in 2005.

At Vijaypura, the change was evident. The walls revealed everything that was in the public domain — the days of labour allotted to each family member under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), what they paid in the muster rolls issued by the labour ministry, the number of houses built under the Indira Awaas Yojana (now the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Awaas Yojana or PMGAY), public works the panchayat had undertaken, what sort of construction material was purchased for these projects and more. The walls were whitewashed every year and adorned afresh with financial art that reflected a new year’s income and expenditure.

Vijaypura underlined the success of the RTI movement, which spread from the interiors of Rajasthan to the heart of India, its Parliament. The cluster of villages embraced transparency in its fullest spirit, electrifying others to comply with the RTI Act.

But there is concern that this very spirit has been curtailed. Last week, Parliament passed the contentious Right to Information (Amendment) Bill 2019, which activists and Opposition members believe will dilute the citizen’s right to information. With the amendment, the government will have a greater say in the appointment of chief information commissioners and information commissioners, who safeguard the right to access information.

Vijaypura’s walls, however, continue to be inked with facts and figures. They tell villagers — the gram panchayat now has a population of 6,500 — how many of them received their pensions, about ration shop grain stocks and disbursals, how many toilets were built, what it cost to build a school, and resources allocated for public health centres. With the information readily available, discrepancies in the figures — or lack of data — are resolved by raising an RTI with some help from the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), a grassroots movement co-founded in 1990 by former bureaucrat-turned-activist Aruna Roy and social activists Nikhil Dey and Shankar Singh, which spearheaded the RTI movement.

RTI pioneers: Social activist Aruna Roy (third from left) and Nikhil Dey (fourth from left) of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), a grassroots movement

“The painted walls of the Vijaypura gram panchayat became like a lab test, the results of which influenced villages far and wide to do the same,” Shankar Singh says over the phone from Devdungri. Coupled with robust social audits, where villagers call out discrepancies in resource allocation or disbursement, the walls ensured good governance in the countryside.

Villagers in Vijaypura understood the strength of the Act. They were entitled to information, and if the administration failed to answer their questions, they knew they could file an RTI petition for the answers. They could point to their family’s name on the MGNREGS charts on the wall, and tell you the minimum wage they earned along with the public works the village had undertaken and how it used its cash flows. They knew how to interpret the data.

The RTI Act has often been described as a game-changer in modern India. In giving citizens access to public information, it sought to usher in a regime where such information would be easily available, and would not require filing a petition, as Section 4 of the RTI Act underlined.

“Section four of the RTI Act is its most powerful and progressive arm,” Nikhil Dey tells BL ink at a meeting in the Capital.

The Section states that every public authority shall constantly endeavour “to provide as much information suo motu to the public at regular intervals through various means of communications, including internet, so that the public have minimum resort to the use of this Act to obtain information”. It also mandates that the information should be “easily accessible to the public”.

Vijaypura has put these words into action. The wall paintings are a way of providing suo motu information, at regular intervals, making it easily accessible to the public.

“There is nothing to hide here. It’s all in the open. The fear of getting exposed keeps corruption away,” Ghotu Ram, a 75-year-old resident of Vijaypura, tells BL ink on the phone.

All eyes and ears: There is nothing to hide here. It’s all in the open, believe the villagers of Vijaypura

It all started in December 1994 at a Jan Sunwai or social audit that focused on the issue of illegal land use. These audits, organised by the villagers, were powerful tools that often forced administrations to act. This particular audit at Vijaypura unravelled a fraudulent public auction of the panchayat’s grazing land, worth more than ₹70 lakh, at throwaway prices for an upcoming highway. The RTI Story , written by Aruna Roy with the MKSS Collective, reveals that not one of the 800 people who had purportedly attended the so-called public auction was actually there, but many found that their signatures had been falsely attested. An FIR was lodged. It was after this that a collective need for transparency arose in Vijaypura.

“Earlier, people had to beg for their rights. RTI brought us dignity,” says Kaluram, who was sarpanch of the Vijaypura gram panchayat from 2005 to 2010, the period when awareness on RTI increased. “We didn’t need government authorities to do us a favour. We had earned a right to know,” he says on the phone from Vijaypura.

An election budget of ₹695

Another story that the villagers are proud of has to do with the 2005 election of Kaluram, who was an MKSS worker. A Dalit ward member, he contested the panchayat election from Vijaypura and worked to bring about transparency in the gram panchayat. His entire election campaign was fought on a budget of ₹695, only to show that the poor and honest could emerge victorious in parliamentary elections too. The villagers had kept an all-night vigil before they went to vote to ensure that no rival agents could try and lure voters with alcohol or money. Kaluram won.

“We elected Kaluram because he couldn’t be bribed,” a resident had said in 2009.

An awareness app

With the latest amendment to the RTI Act passed in Parliament on July 25, many fear the independence of the information commissioner’s office could be thwarted by placing it under the purview of the Central government, instead of the autonomous body it was enacted to be. How will this impact gram panchayats such as Vijaypura?

“Essentially, we can expect long delays, no replies to RTI queries and more government bodies to be listed outside the purview of the RTI,” says Singh.

An estimated 5-6 million information requests are filed each year across the country. RTI applicants have faced threats and intimidation and many have even lost their lives after raising questions. “ Aap kaun hain poochne waale (who are you to question) is the refrain,” explains Singh, who has spent 29 years with the MKSS articulating an answer.

The MKSS is looking at ways to counter the stonewalling. For the past two years it has been working closely with the government of Rajasthan to build a Jan Soochna or public awareness portal (www.jansoochna.rajasthan.gov.in). The portal, apart from being an open access website, will be available in two more avatars — a Jan Soochna app that can be installed on smartphones and, more ambitiously, via 10,000 Jan Soochna digital kiosks to be set up at the panchayat level in every district of Rajasthan. The kiosks will give the public access to touchscreen computers that offer bilingual information from across 15 government departments. Not just that, it will be a hub where people can file a grievance complaint or raise an RTI through the system. The plan is to have a human interface at the kiosk who can help the public make the most of it.

While the kiosks and app will officially launch ahead of RTI day, which is on October 12, the portal already pulls up real-time information from across all government schemes in the state to provide granular household-level details ranging from MGNREGS, public health, ration, PMGAY, pension to public works, sanitation and more. “This is a janta information system instead of the management information system we’re used to,” Dey says. With this government thrust on digitising all records the MKSS collective believed half the transparency battle was won. “What we needed was to do away with the ‘admin logins’ to make the data ‘open access’,” says Dey.

The Congress party, which is ruling in Rajasthan, had promised more accountability in its election manifesto earlier this year. The Jan Soochna portal was a big way of accomplishing that.

Sitting in New Delhi, I can see through the portal that 57-year-old Anacchi Devi, who lives in Vijaypura and holds a below poverty line (BPL) ration card that enlists a family of seven, took 30 kg of wheat from a neighbourhood ration shop on July 21, at 4:36 pm. “With this we can see the beneficiaries who have fallen through the cracks — the elderly, the poor, the disabled and the disenfranchised who have been denied entitlements,” Dey says.

This, he adds, is open governance, not just open data.

“It’s just like Vijaypura’s wall paintings. Except now we’ve made the walls digital,” smiles Dey, still hopeful. But with the RTI being thwarted from the top, what hope is there for such data transparency to be made available to the masses across the country? “It absolutely will pan out!” Dey exclaims. “As soon as you show how one state has done it, people will begin to put pressure in the other states. If the commissions are unable to resolve RTI queries, the portal shows that people can still go on using the law to bring to their mohallas better governance.”

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