Nerve Endings Firing Away

I was fortunate enough to spot a lone flyer in our architecture building announcing that Arvind Kejriwal, the ex-bureaucrat who pioneered the RTI movement in India and winner of this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Award, was speaking on campus. Usually I’ll not walk through lashing rain that seems to have become a regular feature this Texan fall but this time, I made an exception. The talk was hosted by the local AID chapter of Texas A&M. The audience was mostly desi with a lone American who turned out to be a bored journalist of the school paper (she asked me for comments after the talk).

In a nutshell, Arvind is a passionate speaker who completely believes in the power of the Right to Information Act. His organization, Parivartan based in Delhi has employed RTI in numerous scenarios to make the local government more accountable and transparent. He considers this revolutionary law as “history in the making.” He genuinely believes that corruption, the malaise of Indian bureacracy can be eliminated simply by using this act in innovative ways. He narrated several personal examples in and around Delhi where the RTI act was used to counter errant government officials and even to cancel a World Bank sponsored project that would have adversely affected the water delivery system in Delhi.

The Right to Information Act became effective on 13th October 2005. But its origins lie in the Supreme Court ruling of 1976 in the case of Raj Narain v. State of UP. The ruling declared that the right to information was embedded within the right to freedom of speech and expression as mandated by the Constitution Article 19(1). The rationale was that people cannot speak or express themselves adequately unless they know so they have complete right to demand information from the government to which they hand over a large part of their income.

Personally, I have not used this act as I do not live in India currently but was introduced to its potential when bloggers used it to demand information regarding the Blogspot ban. RTI, as I understood from Kejriwal’s talk, is an important tool to fix responsibility on bureaucrats and officials. Once the information is in the public domain and in writing, corrupt officials cannot wriggle their way out and must come clean or at least clean up their act. Kejriwal’s organization Parivartan organized a mass public awareness campaign in collaboration with 700 NGO and six media partners.

Arvind Kejriwal narrated several stories that he was personally involved with. The stories of a daily wage laborer demanding progress reports on his ration card application and that of a software engineer demanding to see technical reports of a road construction project including right to personally inspect the site got officials running around fulfilling their duties on a war footing instead of the lackadisical manner that we usually associate Indian bureaucracy with.

India definitely got its freedom from its colonial masters but citizens continue to be enslaved by their Indian counterparts (babus) who siphon off hundreds of crores of rupees that are intended for public good. Kejriwal narrated in great detail Parivartan’s campaign against the Delhi food distribution system (ration shops) after it was discovered that almost 95% of the grain allocated to the poorest of the poor was sold off in the black market by the ration shop owners in collaboration with bureaucrats and politicans.

Of course, not everything is as rosy as it seems. Officials who are used to abusing their power will not be willing to hand it over this easily. They have been habituated to the corrupt system and they often tend to protect their own (I’m still surprised that this law got passed). The five Information Commissioners in charge of enforcing penalties in case the application for RTI is not honored within the stipulated time period, have refused to do so; even citing ridiculous reasons such as Ahimsa. There was talk earlier this year of the Indian cabinet attempting to introduce amendents to the RTI act that would effectively cripple it. Kejriwal acknowledged the threat to this act that empowers the citizenry but he exhorted us repeatedly to help spread the word (I hope I am doing just that) and use RTI to such an extent that it becomes an integral part of our democracy. Removing or drastically amending the act would then tantamount to political suicide.

Frankly, I have considered rampant corruption to be one of the primary factors impeding India’s progress. According to Kejriwal, the path to eliminating or at least severly curbing corruption lies through rigorously employing the RTI act to demand accountability. He stressed the fact that we should spread the word that we need not bribe officials (or resort to Gandhigiri) in order to get our work done in India as long as we have the power vested by the RTI.

The question-n-answer session seemed to throw up more interesting facts and the obstacles in implementing RTI but unfortunately the room in the MSC was only booked for so long. Damn! the organizers should realize that the meat of any talk is in the Q&A session where the speaker can directly address specific concerns and narrate ground realities. But overall, it was an extremely interesting ans stimulating session that got me invigorated. The walk through the rain was definitely worth it.

Update: Coincidentally, Sunil who writes at Balancing Life was also at the talk and shares more detailed observations. He was lucky enough to spend a couple of hours talking with Arvind Kejriwal before the talk.