Students at the premier engineering institute, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), are looking to make the governments more accountable. As part of their social initiative during the yearly Techfest, students of IIT Bombay will be organising training camps in the run-up to the festival not just in IITs but in over 50 colleges that take part in the festival.
The Techfest will be held between January 2 and 4, 2015. The training workshops will be held as pre-fest preparations from this month and will run up to September. "Each year, the fest has a social initiative. Last year, we had one on cancer and tobacco. This year, we thought of making the government more accountable. We ideated for a month and we read different laws and found out that Right to Information (RTI) is the best way to do that," said Hitesh Sahare, an IIT-Bombay student and events manager of Techfest.
The laws that were considered before squaring on RTI were Right to Education (RTE), Right to Services and even social audit. "We could not integrate social audit into the campaign in this kind of a large-scale exercise. Right to Services was not there in all states. On RTE, the basic problem we faced was that the government is not accountable. RTI had a better outreach as it is a central Act and everything was going hand in hand if we question them and make them accountable. That is why we squared on this," added Sahare.
The Techfest has collaborated with the National Campaign for People's Right to Informaiton (NCPRI). The workshops will be held from August 28 across 14 cities and in over 50 colleges by NCPRI activists from the areas where the colleges are situated. The two-day workshop will tell students how to file RTI, be part of participatory democracy, share success stories of RTI and end with each student filing one question
through RTI they have always wanted to ask the government.
"The workshops will be held in different dates at different engineering colleges between August and September. We are doing this because it is a better thing for empowerment of the community. These are prospective engineers and they will get experience from a young age. The idea is that students who are in technical background use RTI. Once they know the Act and confront, small issues can also become public interest issues," said Bhaskar Prabhu, co-convenor of NCPRI.
IITians expect around 60,000 to 70,000 students to benefit from the excercise.
The initiative will be formally launched by another IIT alumnus and former central information commissioner, Shailesh Gandhi. "The idea is not just to expose them to RTI but make them think in terms of governance of the country. RTI is a great tool to hold the government accountable; it empowers people and we need a large number of people to do this. It will also help in true participatory democracy," said Gandhi.
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