The RTI Story: Power to the People

Mkss Collection Mkss Collection, Aruna Roy

Description

The RTI Story: Power to the People is the story of a campaign that evolved into a genuine and vibrant people’s movement. Culled from the voices of people, often such stories only feed into the research of scholars, largely unacknowledged and forgotten. The dominant narrative is always from the perspective of the ruler and single individuals. One had hoped that democracy would set it right. But the people who are the primary contributors to the discourse always remain on the fringes. Written by Aruna Roy with the MKSS collective, this book is for everyone who asks questions, seeks answers to fight corruption and injustice and challenges arbitrary power. It is a celebration of commitment laced with humour, the struggle, the songs, the theatres of protest, long spells on the street and drafting a peoples’ law.

Sujets

• Human Services
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Struggle
• Injustice
• Oppressor
• Challenge
• Aruna Roy
• People
• People's Movement
• Gopalkrishna Gandhi
• Laborer
• Scholarly method
• Equality
• Wage
• Campaign
• Narrative
• Illegal
• Peasant
• Rights
• Government
• Power
• RTI
• Democracy
• Research
• Legall de Kermeur
• Law
• IAS
• ACT
• Corruption
• Constitution
• Rajasthan

Informations

• Publié par: Roli Books
• Date de parution: 31 mai 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9788193704912
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

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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FORTHCOMING TITLES Rahul Bedi The Last Word: Obituaries of 100 Indian who Led Unusual Lives
 

 
ROLI BOOKS
This digital edition published in 2018
First published in 2018 by
The Lotus Collection
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Copyright © Aruna Roy, 2018
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eISBN: 978-81-937049-1-2
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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 privileges as citizens in the constitution and provisions in it for the accounting and audit of public funds were designed to open up our newly won freedom to public view, public experiencing. They were to save us from ourselves, help our lungs take in a new breath of our newly free air. The Constitution did not make these rights absolute or un-bridled but it did clothe them with what, speaking in the Constituent Assembly on 4 November 1948, Dr. Ambedkar called ‘Constitutional morality’. This was a new and novel concept. The authorities of the state, he said, were empowered but their