Mintu Devi’s relationship with the ration shop changed the day she filed an RTI. In the jhuggis of New Seemapuri, situated on the northeastern edge of Delhi, she is a legend. The 37-year-old mother of four is an Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY) card holder — the pink paper issued to the ‘poorest of the poor’, whose income is less than ₹250 per month. Her household is entitled to receive a monthly supply of ration at subsidised prices — 25kg of wheat at ₹2/kg, 10kg of rice at ₹3/kg, and sugar at ₹13.50/kg. But for nearly three years she received no ration, until she finally lodged a complaint in 2012.

At Hans Raj Malhotra and Sons, one of the dozen fair price shops (FPS) in Seemapuri, Mintu Devi was turned away time and time again. Twice every month, she would queue up at the shop, clutching her AAY card. “They would shout and send me away. Sometimes, they would show me discarded husk and tell me to collect my ration,” she says.

More than 7,000 migrant families from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Assam reside in this resettlement colony and clusters, chiefly employed as daily wage workers, construction labourers, rag-pickers, and domestic help. Mintu Devi works at the anganwadi, while her husband is a daily wage worker. Denied her ration and bullied, each visit to the FPS was an ordeal that brought Mintu Devi to tears. “Baar baar bhaga rahe the, to RTI daal diya (They made me run around, so I filed an RTI),” she says, shrugging her thin shoulders. She was threatened at a public meeting called by the shop owner. “I had returned from my village in Bihar that day. People came and told me that the shopkeeper, aided by local muscle, had sworn to tear my limbs if I didn’t take back my complaint.” At the Department of Food, Supplies and Consumer Affairs, her grievance was similarly dismissed. But she stood her ground and followed up on the RTI. In a little over a month, a cheque for around ₹7,000 arrived at her doorstep. That was the bill for three years’ worth of essential supplies for her household.

According to a 2013 study titled ‘Life in Seemapuri,’ carried out by NGO Pardarshita, which works on RTI in the area, 47 per cent of households in E44 and E46 blocks of the JJ cluster do not possess ration cards. In Mintu Devi’s block, E44, nearly 40 per cent of BPL (below poverty line) and AAY card holders don’t receive ration. In her case, RTI had worked like a magic wand. The complaint was filed, action was taken in a time-bound manner, and her ration was regularised. But behind these administrative measures, a more elemental shift had occurred. Mintu Devi had questioned, and demanded answers from, traditional power structures — the neighbourhood ration shop, government offices and the state. By exercising her right to know, she also accessed her right to food. In the last three years, she has filed at least “100 RTIs” and held the government accountable. The narrow, dark lanes of E44 now teem with scores of Mintu Devis, who use RTI to wield their democratic rights.

Last month the Right to Information Act (2005) turned 10. What started as a demand to open up the muster rolls of workers in Rajasthan has now become a byword for democracy. In the last decade, the RTI Act was used to expose scams such as Adarsh, Vyapam, and Commonwealth; to uncover irregularities in the implementation of social welfare schemes such as MGNREGA, Midday Meal Scheme, and RTE (right to education) Act across states; and to deliver basic rights and entitlements — Mintu Devi her ration, Kinni Singh her voter card and Asraf, school admission under the EWS (economically weaker section) quota.

Information to democracy

What has the right to know done to democracy? What has changed? “The first thing is that we can ask a question. Information aside, we can now walk into a government office, ask a question and demand an answer,” says Nikhil Dey, RTI activist and a founder of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS). He adds, “We may not get the answers or policies we want, but at least we will be heard and our questions will be asked.” This, he says, is the most practical way to return to a more direct participatory democracy. “This is the only act in the country (proviso to Section 8 of RTI Act) that equates the citizen with the legislator.”

What is the RTI? A technical tool, a redress mechanism, and a very good law. But it is also a thought process, a political paradigm, and a relationship between the citizen and the state, adds Dey.

On December 2, 1994, MKSS held its first jan sunwai (public hearing) in Kot Kirana village, Rajasthan. Hundreds of workers voiced four demands: open up the panchayat records, conduct a public audit, redressal in the form of money to complete development works, and government accountability. That first public meeting led to a cycle of protests, which came to a head two years later at a massive rally in Beawar, Rajasthan, where the crowds pressed the state government for a right to information law. The 40-day dharna marked the beginning of the national RTI campaign.

Recently, at a packed hall in Lady Shri Ram College Delhi, Dey told students how the movement had unfolded, transforming from a pithy slogan — ‘personal is political’ — into a series of war cries: yeh paisa humare aapki, nahi kisi ke baap ki, yeh panchayat humare aapki, nahi kisi ke baap ki, sarkar humare aapka, nahi kise ke baap ka. Humara paisa, humara hisab (This money, this panchayat, this government is ours, and not your father’s. It is our money, our accounts.)

The same day, across town, Aruna Roy, social activist and a pioneer of the RTI movement, told the young audience at Indra Prastha College a different part of the same story. She recounted the tale of Class IV dropout Sushila, who attended a press conference in Delhi, in 1996, alongside experts and activists. When asked why a “semi-literate woman like her wants RTI”, she replied, “When I send my son to the market with ₹10, I ask him to account for every rupee. The government spends billions in my name, why should I not ask for accounts?”

In the early noughties, parts of Delhi also witnessed an outcry for a right to information law. Localities like Seemapuri and Sunder Nagri were labs, where Arvind Kejriwal’s NGO Parivartan kicked off a movement against corruption in the public distribution system. Since 2007, however, Pardarshita, an offshoot with members from the original team, has continued to work in the resettlement colonies, demanding hisab (accountability) from the central and state governments at the rate of almost 300 RTIs a month — that is, 10 complaints a day.

What do Seemapuri residents ask for in so many RTIs? The answer is simple: What happened to your electoral promises and our basic rights — our ration, pension, and school admission?

Even a quick study of the RTIs filed in Seemapuri over the last 10 years reveals the denial of basic rights. For instance, an RTI filed in 2013 disclosed that over 600 people in the JJ cluster had lost the right to vote. Based on a Delhi police order, certain areas were deemed to harbour ‘illegal Bangladeshis’, calling for police verification before issuing voter cards. So, since 2008, voter cards had not been issued in Seemapuri, and residents who already had ID cards were simply struck off electoral rolls. Police verification never took place.

When 25-year-old Kinni Singh, a migrant from Bihar, reached the poll booth in 2012 to cast her vote in the Delhi municipal elections, she found her name missing. “We were informed that our names had been removed because we didn’t provide any proof of Indian citizenship,” says Singh, who was born in a government hospital nearby and attended government school up to Class X.

“The Delhi government’s own survey revealed that there were eight cases of Bangladeshi migrants in Delhi and none of them were from Seemapuri,” says Rakesh Agarwal of Pardarshita. As Assam heads for assembly elections next year, the longstanding issue of citizenship has already reared its head, but here was a colony in the Capital which was denied the right to vote on an assumption that they could be illegal migrants from Bangladesh. “In 2013, after we had filed the RTI, they set up a voter camp and issued cards to everyone, without any verification,” says Singh.

Or consider the case of government schools. “If you see, the number of schools in this area has gone up... on paper,” says Rajiv Kumar of Pardarshita.

On the ground, however, what it means is that a single school building functions as three different schools, where one classroom holds three separate sections. So, the East Delhi Municipal Corporation School building houses the New Seemapuri B block school on its ground and first floors, and the Dilshad Garden A block school on the second floor in the morning shift. A third school occupies the premises in the afternoon shift. Each classroom, stipulated to have not more than 40 students, accommodates thrice as many.

Several RTIs filed by the organisation have revealed the abysmal state of implementation of a fundamental right. Twenty seven per cent of Delhi’s government schools do not receive Delhi Jal Board water; vacancies under the EWS quota are seldom displayed on boards; schools continue to collect fees in the guise of ayah or festival funds, despite free and compulsory education under the RTE; and school management committees continue to be chaired by principals, not parents (the only state where this happens).

Perhaps this abject state of schools explains why even Mintu Devi’s 18-year-old daughter has filed a few RTIs. At the J&K block government school, Neetu filed an RTI last year to find out why only five students in her class of 69 had passed the English exam. “We knew why. Our English teacher came to class at the end of the academic year. She taught us nothing, but recorded some sample audios to submit to the school board. I would have to repeat a year because she neglected her duty,” says the Class XII student. Neetu was called to the principal’s office, where she met an irate English teacher facing suspension. “She told me that it might take me 11 years, but I would still not pass. I did on the first attempt,” says Neetu, who is now in the same grade as her younger sister Anshu, 17, also an RTI-pro.

While Pardarshita acts on individual complaints as well as issues that affect policy decisions, Dey says the focus at MKSS “is on class-action issues.” For instance, a PIL filed by Roy and Dey examines the “haphazard implementation of MGNREGS and delay in payment of wages and compensation to workers.” The petition contends that the government has arrears of ₹3,200 crore in the world’s largest social sector scheme.

Q&A on education

In another campaign called Shiksha Ka Sawaal Abhiyan (SSA), launched last year with Rajasthan Patrika, the MKSS is asking six questions, including ‘What is the state of education across the 85,000 schools in Rajasthan?’ and ‘How do we move from information towards accountability?’ Thousands of parents, who had never stepped inside a school before, marched to offices and filed RTIs with the same set of questions. “Most of these parents experience the same alienation at schools that they do in a government office. Now the government has issued an order that all information will be available at the block level, which is a significant order,” says Dey.

What happens in Seemapuri or Rajasthan is representative of how RTI has changed people’s lives and their relationship with democracy. According to the 2011-13 ‘People’s Monitoring of the RTI Regime in India’ report, around four million RTIs are filed every year — that is, more than seven RTIs per hour. Fourteen per cent users are from rural areas, 58 per cent from towns and cities, and 29 per cent from metropolises. Forty nine RTI activists have been killed in the last 10 years, but the questions they asked remain. One in five people knows about the RTI. “People own the act, use the act, and propagate the act,” says Dey. “Their perceptions of democracy are different but they have an equal right. It (RTI) has changed one of the worst relationships: that of the police station and the victim,” says Roy, giving the example of Dalit victims of violence who have fought back.

Successive governments have tried to weaken the 10-year-old act. If the UPA government tried, unsuccessfully, to amend the act, implementation has suffered under the current dispensation. Political parties continue to resist coming under it. Compliance of Section 4, one of the most important sections, has been very poor. “An audit of the prime minister’s and all chief ministers’ websites reveals their compliance of Section 4. While the PMO website offers no disclosures, only four chief ministers have some sort of information,” say Anjali Bhardwaj and Amrita Johri, co-authors of the People’s report, and members of Satark Nagrik Sangathan and National Campaign for People’s Right to Information.

For eight months, from August last year to March 2015, the Modi government vacillated over the appointment of the chief information commissioner. Pendency of appeals doubled, from 7,560 to 14,516. According to a recent report in The Hindu, the CIC has been admitting “fewer and fewer cases every month this year.” An ongoing study of 2,000 CIC and State Information Commissions (SICs) shows that more than half of the orders have not recorded basic information; penalties are not being imposed; applicants are increasingly asked to state reasons for filing RTIs; and petitions are being dismissed over frivolous reasons. “If the government were to see the RTI as a management tool, they’d see a huge potential for good governance, less expenditure and corruption, but they’re not wedded to the idea of an open culture at all,” says Dey.

Roy adds, “Gopal Gandhi said (at a meeting to celebrate a decade of RTI) there are three things indispensable for democracy — the Constitution, people’s representation of it, and the right to information. They are the three pillars of democracy. Take away any one of this, there is no democracy.”