Right-to-Know Law Gives India’s Poor a Lever

[Bang Galore]

A grant for the poor was elusive to Chanchala Devi until she used India’s right-to-know law.

By LYDIA POLGREEN
Published: June 28, 2010

BANTA, India — Chanchala Devi always wanted a house. Not a mud-and-stick hut, like her current home in this desolate village in the mineral-rich, corruption-corroded state of Jharkhand, but a proper brick-and-mortar house. When she heard that a government program for the poor would give her about $700 to build that house, she applied immediately.

As an impoverished day laborer from a downtrodden caste, she was an ideal candidate for the grant. Yet she waited four years, watching as wealthier neighbors got grants and built sturdy houses, while she and her three children slept beneath a leaky roof of tree branches and crumbling clay tiles.

Two months ago she took advantage of India’s powerful and wildly popular Right to Information law. With help from a local activist, she filed a request at a local government office to find out who had gotten the grants while she waited, and why. Within days a local bureaucrat had good news: Her grant had been approved, and she would soon get her check.

Ms. Devi’s good fortune is part of an information revolution sweeping India. It may be the world’s largest democracy, but a vast and powerful bureaucracy governs. It is an imperial edifice built on feudal foundations, and for much of independent India’s history the bureaucracy has been largely unaccountable. Citizens had few means to demand to know what their government was doing for them.

But it has now become clear that India’s 1.2 billion citizens have been newly empowered by the far-reaching law granting them the right to demand almost any information from the government. The law is backed by stiff fines for bureaucrats who withhold information, a penalty that appears to be ensuring speedy compliance.

The law has not, as some activists hoped, had a major effect on corruption. Often, as in Ms. Devi’s case, the bureaucracy solves the problem for the complaining individual, but seldom undertakes a broader inquiry.

Still, the law has become part of the fabric of rural India in the five years since it was passed, and has clearly begun to tilt the balance of power, long skewed toward bureaucrats and politicians.

“The feeling in government has always been that the people working in government are the rulers, and the people are the ruled,” said Wajahat Habibullah, the central government’s chief information commissioner. “This law has given the people the feeling that the government is accountable to them.”

Rajiv Gandhi, a former prime minister, once said that only 15 percent of spending on the poor actually reached them — the rest was wasted or siphoned off.

That figure may have changed in the decades since he uttered it, but few Indians doubt that a good chunk of the roughly $47 billion budgeted this fiscal year to help impoverished citizens is lost.

India’s Right to Information law has given the poor a powerful tool to ensure they get their slice of that cake. The law, passed after more than a decade of agitation by good-government activists, has become embedded in Indian folklore. In the first three years the law was in effect, two million applications were filed.

Jharkhand is an eastern Indian state where corruption and incompetence are rife, fueled by mineral wealth and the political chaos that has gripped the state since it was carved out of the state of Bihar in 2000. Here the rural poor are using the law to solve basic problems. Their success stories seem like the most minor of triumphs, but they represent major life improvements for India’s poorest.

In one village near Banta, a clinic that was supposed to be staffed full time by a medical worker trained to diagnose ailments like malaria and diarrhea and provide care to infants and expectant mothers had not been staffed regularly for years. A local resident filed a request to see worker attendance records. Soon the medical worker started showing up regularly.

The worker, Sneha Lata, an assistant midwife whose government salary is $250 a month, denied that she had been neglecting her post. She said the information law was a nuisance. “Because of this law I have to listen to all these complaints,” she said. But with villagers now watching, she dares not miss work.

In a nearby hut, Ramani Devi sewed a blanket for a grandson born nine days earlier. In years past she would have been in the fields, toiling for a handful of change to make ends meet. As an elderly widow, Ms. Devi (no relation to Chanchala Devi) knew she was entitled to a $9 monthly government pension. That may not sound like much, but in a rural village, it is the difference between eating and starving.

A goat herder and her children in Jharkhand, a corrupt state where the poor use India’s right-to-know law to solve basic problems.

In Jabri, a village in Jharkhand, a clinic was often closed, but a claim filed under the information law led to more regular hours.
Middlemen at the government office demand bribes of $20 to direct applications to the right bureaucrat, and many people ineligible for pensions were collecting them. When a local activist filed a request to find out which villagers were receiving pensions, Ms. Devi, who is a Dalit, formerly known as an untouchable, finally got her pension. Now she proudly shows off her savings account passbook.

Simply filing an inquiry about a missing ration card, a wayward pension application or a birth certificate is nowadays enough to force the once stodgy bureaucracy to deliver, activists here say.

But a more responsive bureaucracy is not necessarily less corrupt.

Sunil Kumar Mahto, 29, an activist in Ranchi, Jharkhand’s capital, said he quickly learned that using the law to expose corruption was pointless. He gave the example of a road project. “The money was spent, but there was no road,” Mr. Mahto said.

When he applied to find out what had happened, new money was allocated and the road was ultimately built. But no action was taken against whoever had pocketed the original money.

“The nexus of politicians, contractors and bureaucrats is very strong here,” Mr. Mahto explained. “To get action against someone is very difficult.”

Some critics wonder if the law is simply a pressure valve that allows people to get basic needs addressed without challenging the status quo. “It has been very successful in rooting out petty corruption,” said Venkatesh Nayak of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative. “But our accountability mechanisms are weak, and transparency has no purpose without accountability.”

But Shekhar Singh, an activist who fought for passage of the law, said that in a nation recovering from centuries of colonial and feudal oppression, fighting corruption was secondary.

“Our main objective was to empower citizens,” Mr. Singh said. “This law has done that — given the people the power to challenge their government. That is no small thing.”

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[Bang Galore]

Prying Open India’s Vast Bureaucracy

By AKASH KAPUR
Published: June 17, 2010


PONDICHERRY, India — P.M.L. Kalayansundaram calls himself a human rights worker. He runs an organization that provides a variety of services to villagers in this area — legal aid, financial assistance to help them organize marriage and death ceremonies, and free refrigerated coffin boxes that they would otherwise have to procure at exorbitant rates from private merchants.

On a recent afternoon, he told me that he had been determined from a young age to do social work. He remembered being harassed by the traffic police as a boy. Though just 14 years old, he felt even then that government was supposed to work for people, not against them. He was determined to increase the responsiveness of local officials.

Recently, Mr. Kalayansundaram has been making use of a new tool in his efforts to improve governance. He has been filing a growing number of requests for information under India’s Right to Information Act.

The act, passed by Parliament five years ago this week, aimed to introduce greater transparency in governance. It requires all authorities to appoint public information officers and to respond to requests for information within 30 days.

When the act, modeled on similar freedom of information laws in other countries, was first passed, many were doubtful that it would prove effective. Skeptics predicted that officials would find a way around it. Officials themselves worried that they would be swamped by trivial and vindictive requests that would dilute the original purpose of the law.

It is true that the implementation of the act has been uneven at times. But half a decade after its passage, it is generally acknowledged as landmark legislation that is changing the relationship between citizens and their representatives; and that has the potential to transform governance in India.

The experience of men like Mr. Kalayansundaram suggests just how that potential could be achieved slowly, information request by information request. Sitting on a lawn under the hot sun, he told me of the various ways in which he had used the act, and of the small but significant changes that had resulted.

He told me, for instance, of the information request he had made that revealed excessive spending by local officials on fuel and office snacks. When he publicized the information in newspapers, the expenses came down.

He told me, too, about an information request he made that revealed that some politicians were paying rent for houses in their or their relatives’ names. This practice, too, had diminished.

One of his greatest successes came recently, when he used the act to help solve a homicide case that had lain dormant for months. Based on information Mr. Kalayansundaram received through an information request, the police were able to identify a suspect.

Mr. Kalayansundaram emphasized that his efforts have not always gone smoothly. He talked of recalcitrant officials who held up requests for information and of the death threats he had received. Some opponents had put up posters around his house questioning his sources of income and accusing him of illegal activity.

Still, his overall sense was that the law was improving governance. “All the officials are scared of R.T.I. now,” he said, speaking of the information act. “They move more quickly. If they don’t answer within 30 days, they know they can be suspended.”

One of the chief benefits of the law, Mr. Kalayansundaram said, is that it confers something of an administrative weapon that responsive officials can use against less responsive colleagues. It permits, in effect, what the political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta called “institutional competition,” a way for different branches of government to maintain oversight over each other, which is an essential component of good governance.

Using the information act, for example, a person can provide information to a judge that allows the judiciary to challenge police inaction. Likewise, the law permits honest officials to act on information collected by citizens against corrupt officials in their own department.

Over the years, the act has been hailed as revolutionary and emancipatory. Last year, President Pratibha Patil said that it had “created a virtual Parliament of People.”

Such praise seems to be borne out by the many stories of people across the country using the act to uncover corruption and improve public services. According to a recent survey conducted by a coalition of civil society groups, more than two million information requests were filed in the first two and a half years after the law’s inception.

But one of the law’s primary limitations remains the relatively low level of awareness among citizens and activist groups. Another survey on the law’s impact conducted by the consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, found that only about 15 percent of the public knew of the law’s existence. This figure was even lower among traditionally marginalized sections of society, like women and rural residents.

Such findings are echoed by Mr. Kalayansundaram, who said that the chief obstacle he faced was the public’s lack of familiarity with the law.

To remedy this, he has been writing articles about the act in a magazine published by his organization. Once a year, on Dec. 10, internationally recognized as Human Rights Day, he drives around in a van with a loudspeaker attached to the roof, touting the law’s benefits.

Such campaigns, he told me, were starting to show results. “I’m no longer the only person doing it,” he said of his frequent information requests. “This is going to grow and grow. It will definitely change the country.”

I asked him how long he thought it would take to achieve that change. “Five years,” he answered confidently.

“Ten years, or maybe more,” he added.

“But however long, this country will definitely change.”

Letter from India - Prying Open India?s Vast Bureaucracy - NYTimes.com

 

[peacekeeper]

RTI is a great tool that people are using and getting benefitted by them

But there are efforts made to make this tool toothless by exempting the file notings from the act.