The Right to Information India's Struggle against Grass-Roots Corruption.

India is the largest democracy in the world. Despite a bewildering variety of religions, cultures, languages, food habits, customs and traditions, the ballot box keeps this country together.

Immense problems such as extremes of wealth and poverty still prevail because of the caste system in rural India, but there is respect and fear for the power of the vote. However, there are still millions today in the nearly 600,000 villages who are not yet on the voter's list and have no rights. The economic planners, policy makers and the so-called experts sitting in Delhi and the State capitals are ignorant of ground realities and hopelessly out of touch with the situation in the villages.

Strange are the performance indicators of government officials, whose buzz words are transparency and accountability. Anyone who manages to spend the money budgeted and allocated is considered efficient, so the mad rush to show that the amount has actually been spent at year's end is simply solved by falsifying receipt vouchers and muster rolls on a colossal scale. Thousands of schools, dispensaries, roads, small dams, community centres and residential quarters have been shown to be complete on paper, but in reality are incomplete, inhospitably unutilized and abandoned.

There is no transparency and no accountability at the local level where it counts the most. Poor citizens cannot go up to the lowest government functionary and ask how much and for what purpose money is being spent in their village. They have no right to ask for detailed information on expenditure because that is where the corruption begins--making false receipts and vouchers running into millions of dollars.

The general conviction among the over 300 million living below the poverty line is that the public exchequer is being looted, and that the money earmarked for development is going into the pockets of the rich and the powerful. From the highest echelons of Government to the lowest village functionary, the lawmakers and law enforcers are often also the law breakers, and no one in the Government can touch them. Rajiv Gandhi, as Prime Minister of India, once lamented helplessly that out of every rupee spent for development only 17 per cent actually reached the poor.

It takes years for donors and policy makers to wake up and realize what is happening. What is needed is not stronger laws, stricter punishment or more visits to the villages to supervise officials and look into accounts books. Nor will recruiting more experts and re-employing retired bureaucrats help when too often they have been the problem in the first place.

However, a powerful answer has been found by a grass roots movement operating in one of the most backward regions of India. In the early nineties, a mass-based organization calling itself the Mazdoor (Labour) Kisan (Farmer) Shakti (Strength) Sangathan (Organisation) (MKSS) started working in one of the most neglected areas of Rajasthan. Meeting their basic needs with modest public contributions from the community, the core group started living in a small mud hut in the village of Devdungari. Just off the national highway to Udaipur, the villagers could well have been living in the nineteenth century--the way millions of poor people still live in rural India.

The MKSS prepared no project proposals, received no foreign funds, recruited no staff and attracted no visitors, thus making it difficult to classify and slot them. All they did was walk from village to village asking simple questions: did the people know how much money was coming to their village for development and where it was being spent? These were simple questions the poor could understand but had not dared to ask.

The MKSS went to the Government Block Office, which administers development funding in about 100 villages, to request detailed information on development expenditure. They were told they had no right and there was no government rule allowing any villager to demand such information--and get it. At the national and state levels, planners, politicians and administrators, all out of touch with reality, were claiming there was total transparency. At the village level, however, vouchers, bills and muster rolls that showed who was receiving payments or wages were kept secret.

To perforate the "Iron Curtain" between the community and the Government, the MKSS launched a people's campaign, the like of which had never been seen or experienced in Rajasthan since the Freedom Movement in the 1940s. The campaign included several public hearings where cases of misappropriation and corruption of public funds were shared with several thousand people. Sit-in protests and strikes forced a Chief Minister to make a commitment in the State Assembly and then publicly dishonour it. It enabled the establishment of a Committee on Transparency to study the feasibility of supplying photocopies of bills, vouchers and muster rolls. But when the Committee recommended that it was practical, the State Government declared the Committee's findings secret.

The staying power of the MKSS in organizing a 53-day strike in Jaipur, supported and sustained by contributions from ordinary people on the streets, baffled the Government, which refused to yield to the demands of the MKSS. This was strange, because all th e MKSS wanted was for the Government to honour what the Chief Minister had already committed to on the House floor.

The strike ended finally when the Deputy Chief Minister revealed that the State Government had already conceded more than what the MKSS had demanded six months before the strike had been called! No one in the Government, from the Chief Minister and Chief Secretary (senior-most bureaucrat in the State) downwards, was aware of this Gazette (government order) until it surfaced by sheer accident!

The MKSS took the extraordinary Gazelle back to the villages to see how effective it was. It was one thing to pass a government order, it was quite another to see how seriously the village officials and sarpanches (elected village representatives) honoured the order. First, everyone pleaded ignorance: they had received no such Gazelle. So after the first month, every MKSS member kept a copy in his or her tatty pocket to be produced at an instance should any village official dam not having seen it. When applications were submitted at the Block Office and Panchayat (Village Council) headquarters, the village officials refused to act on it.

What was the experience of the MKSS trying to have a written government order implemented?

The orders are meaningless as long as the village officials are strong enough to flaunt and abuse them, knowing fully well that no action can be taken against them. What eventually made them act was the tremendous grassroots following, and indeed moral authority, of the MKSS.

Two months after applying pressure to implement the government order and get the critical information from the Panchayats, the MKSS held its first public hearing in a small village called Kukarkheda. The idea was to share its experience with the people. The MKSS backed its claims with written evidence and documentation extracted from the Block Office, which they shared with in front of several hundred people who first listened in puzzlement and then with collective anger. So great was the pressure from the people and so complete was the public humiliation of these officials that even before the first hearing started, the woman sarpanch of the local Panchayat returned Rs 100,000. In a second public hearing held in Surajpura (Ajmer District), the sarpanch of Rawatmal publicly returned Rs 147,000, while the sarpanch of Surajpura handed back Rs 114,000.

For the first time, since the Panchayat movement was founded in the 1950s under Nehru, village representatives began to return the money they had embezzled from their constituencies. It was not fear of the law or arrest or departmental inquiry or suspension that made them act this way. It was fear of the people through the public hearings that finally humbled them.

Bunker Roy is Director of Barefoot College, Tilonia Rajasthan, India.