In the heart of Beawar, workers and villagers gather at noon on 11 October. They sit on carpets laid out on the triangular stretch of road between the historic Chang Gate and the district’s moderately bustling market. The crowd chants slogans in Hindi, volunteers distribute pamphlets with the words that have brought them to life for decades – “our money, our account(We will account for our money)we will know, we will live,” (We will know, we will live) and ”we will fight, we will win(We will fight, we will win).
Chang Gate is historic, not only because villagers say the structure dates back to the colonial period, but also because of the protests that took place there in 1996. Then, at least 200 laborers and farmers called for officials to hold a “jan suni” or hearing of the people and demanded from them records of everything from land allotments to school expenses.
With the encouragement (and the help of activists like Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), a non-profit organization, it grew into a mass movement that year that terrified the authorities. This started the campaign for transparency which resulted in the Right to Information Act (RTI), 2005. With this Act, an Indian citizen can apply to obtain any government information except issues related to national security.
Over time, it became a tool for activists and journalists to hold the government accountable. “We were pinching ourselves to make sure it was real,” MKSS co-founder Dey said during the candle march, the conversation interrupted repeatedly by long-lost comrades and nervous volunteers asking for directions.
The event, organized to celebrate 20 years of the RTI Act, also mainly called for weakening the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. This is a weakening that will make it much more difficult for the activists who created it to use this law for the purposes for which they intended it.
Concluding with an RTI-themed Rajasthani-language skit, a folk song and a candlelight march in which an autorickshaw was accompanied by a stick puppet shouting slogans, the event is equal parts mobilization and propaganda. It is a pre-event for the Right to Information Fair (Mela) scheduled the next day.
a citizen’s tool
In 1996, the year of the original protests, Rajasthan Chief Minister and Bharatiya Janata Party leader Bhairon Singh Shekhawat made a commitment on the floor of the state legislature to open local municipal records to public scrutiny. But Shekhawat’s commitment became vague the next day when the state government released the fine print: Records would be available for inspection along with fees, and there would be no facility to photocopy them. Shekhawat later argued that there were not enough resources to purchase photocopiers for the state’s numerous local government offices.
MKSS and Beawar residents, along with volunteers from other parts of Rajasthan, put pressure on Chang Gate by staging a sit-in for 40 days. “When we woke up, we found our slippers scattered in the area,” recalls Roy. “The pigs would pick them up and leave them somewhere else.” They called off the protests “in good faith,” says a volunteer, giving the government some leeway to implement the activists’ demands.
It would take four years for a state-level RTI law to be passed in Rajasthan in 2000.
An RTI activist at Chang Gate in Beawar, Rajasthan, a day before the National RTI Fair on October 12 Photo Credit: Sushil Kumar Verma
In government records, RTI activists from Beawar found a powerful tool for mobilization and accountability long before the national law was enacted. In 2001, Sushila Devi learned that snakebite victims were being charged for anti-venom doses during Beawar’s adverse monsoon season, while they were supposed to be given the medicine free of cost in government hospitals. According to records, doctors were also charging ₹500 from mothers after the birth of a child.
“I took these records to villages, and asked people who had received doses or given birth to a child if they had paid,” says Devi, now 60. “He said he had.” Shortly afterward, hospital staff were faced with testimonials and records that showed no payments. “They didn’t give the money back, but said it wouldn’t happen again.”
It was a social audit, one of many conducted in Beawar and across the country after the RTI Act was enacted and implemented, giving people the right to inspect everything from the terms of road construction contracts to ration shop records. It emerged as a powerful tool in the struggle of common citizens against India’s omnipresent nexus between politics and money, which often ensures power.
movement of people and ideas
It is Sunday, the day of the fair. The event is being held at the site where a museum will be built, dedicated to the history of the struggle to pass the RTI Act and its resultant impact. Hundreds of people – workers, volunteers, villagers who have benefited in some way or the other due to RTI requests in the past – gather under a big white tent under the sun. Different stalls have been set up by MKSS’s affiliate organizations – from the people’s movement of Meghalaya to the thousands-strong group of RTI users from Tamil Nadu who took a two-day train journey from Madurai to attend the fair.
The Tamil Nadu delegation, comprising a total of 25 people, has team T-shirts from a gathering held in Kallakurichi in August, which had attracted 2,500 RTI users in the state. Bakiyaraj, an employee of the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board, explains how he used dozens of RTI applications to expose irregularities in the state’s issuance of birth and death certificates with inheritance implications. “I ensured that people got death certificates duly bearing the names of both parents,” he says.
A museum dedicated to the history of the law and the movement of people who helped implement it will be built in Beawar. , Photo courtesy: Sushil Kumar Verma
At one stall, a volunteer explains the proactive disclosure section of the law, along with statutorily required documents from the government website displayed on an LED TV. On the other hand, Beawar native Gaurav Chaurotia, who is currently working as a software engineer in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, narrates how the land papers for municipal rehabilitation, which were held up for 10 years, finally became available to the beneficiaries.
“I was able to get my lease Only two years ago, when I applied 10 years ago,” says Geeta Devi, 62, who was among those who helped Chaurotia. Others were not so lucky: Sugni Devi was in her 80s when she was found leaseAfter that, he faced problems in getting funds under the Prime Minister Housing Construction Subsidy Scheme, PM Awas Yojana. While press coverage documenting his struggle led to those funds being approved, he died at the age of 84 shortly after the cornerstone was laid and before he could see the house he had struggled to build.
sandpapering finished
The RTI Act does not necessarily represent a complete reckoning of political power and its unlawful means and ends in India; This is probably too tall an order for a law. Yet, the structures it created and the rights it wrote into the statute books were a surprise even to those who spent more than a decade fighting for it.
Was there a golden age of RTI Act? Dey says, “Right after its passage, the fear of punishment and blemish on service record and becoming the target of people-led mobilization prevented public information officers from being very procrastinating.
Those days seem far away now. In 2019, Parliament amended the RTI Act, with the central government seizing powers over the tenure and salary of information commissioners. Information Commissioner is an appellate post in both the Center and State. Those who are dissatisfied with the responses to RTI applications can appeal, and if still not satisfied, can approach the High Court.
Movement leaders, activists Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey during the celebrations in Beawar. , Photo courtesy: Sushil Kumar Verma
The shock of Jammu and Kashmir is even bigger than this. Before the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution, the special status of the erstwhile state had allowed it to enact its own RTI Act, which Irfan Banka, a PhD scholar who ran a booth at the fair, says was better than the central Act. “Now, every appeal goes to the Central Information Commission (CIC),” because that’s where RTI appeals from Union Territories go. He said the quality of responses has also gone down.
Appellants cite recent experiences at the CIC, which ranged from frustration to outrage. He says, in the last four years, it is not an uncommon sight to see the Commissioner hearing a case, pushing back the arguments of the Appellant, and passing an order maintaining the status quo, without the Government representative saying much.
Even if the commissions’ allegiance to power does not exceed the public’s right to know, pending cases come to the aid of reluctant government organizations: hearing cases in the CIC takes more than a year, and that timeline is set to extend. The most recent Chief Information Commissioner, Hiralal Samaria, stepped down on 14 September, and the government only invited applications for his successor thereafter, even though the end of his tenure was widely known.
The Samaria vacancy is just the tip of the iceberg: there are 11 posts in the CIC, 9 of which are vacant. Similar dynamics are playing out across the country and sometimes leading to more serious lapses. In 2024, the six State Information Commissions (SIC) had no commissioners to hear cases, even as staff helplessly listed new appeals, not knowing when and how they would be heard. The Supreme Court has asked state governments to fill these vacancies, but those directions have still not been fully implemented, according to a review by the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI), where De is the co-convenor.
But the biggest shock is the 2023 amendment, hidden in the last part of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. The main goals of that law are to punish firms that don’t protect user data from being leaked, and to ensure that people have a choice about how their data is used online. Also, activists have argued that this is a major blow to the RTI Act.
Section 8(1)(j) of the Data Protection Act allows any government organization to refuse “information relating to personal information”. It specifies that there must be a “wider public interest” to justify releasing such information. Legal experts say the 2023 Act expands the scope of ‘personal information’ or information that cannot be disclosed.
The government has argued that this amendment is merely implementing the Supreme Court’s 2017 right to privacy decision, and that information whose disclosure is otherwise statutorily required will be published. Activists disagree: if that happens, the social audits led by Sushila Devi and Gaurav Chaurotia will become simply impossible, they argue.
The amendment has not yet come into force, as the 2023 Act has given the government the power to “notify” when it comes into effect. So far, there are no indications that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, which has the power to implement different sections of the law at different times, is willing to put a stay on implementing the amendment to Section 8(1)(j).
The path ahead is uncertain. “We don’t know what form the resistance will take if the 2023 law is implemented,” says Roy. “But we will not let it sit idle.”
Speaking on the sidelines of the fair, Justice AP Shah, who wrote a strongly worded legal opinion arguing against the amendment, said there was “good scope” for activists to file a legal case against it. Considering all that has been achieved and all that is at stake, Day nevertheless strikes an optimistic note: “This,” he says gesturing at the buzzing fair, “is a movement with a life of its own. An amendment cannot stop it.”
aroon.dep@thehindu.co.in
Edited by Sunalini Mathew
