Now, they have Right to Information (RTI), an act that has proven powerful and has made many a babu to succumb to law and act accordingly.
Ration is one way the Indian government feeds 38% of its population under the poverty line. When denied their deserved food portions, the poor of this nation had no way to react. Now, they have Right to Information (RTI), an act that has proven powerful and has made many a babu to succumb to law and act accordingly.
Many such cases, where the RTI Act was used successfully to bring justice to people came to highlight at a discussion forum, as 50-odd people huddled up in small groups and shared their experiences of using this reformative and useful act that was passed by the Indian Parliament in 2005.
Meeting for the first time, at a forum conducted by NGO Satark Nagrik Sangh at Dadar; people from various strata of the society, including slums, colleges and people from different professions gathered to share their experience and ideas on how to fight the system through the RTI Act. The NGO works towards educating people mainly in slums and students on RTI. “We believe there is a common thread that bonds them together—resistance by people to give them what is theirs—information,” said Vinita Singh, founder member of the NGO.
As people identified themselves and shared their stories, the best experiences were shared with everyone present. The stories included that of slum dwellers with bare minimum education filing RTIs to secure their ration, RTIs filed to thwart usurping of their area by builders; where students forced a college to provide better facilities and also professionals managing to get ration cards and licenses without paying bribes.
“I never paid attention to the fee receipt given by colleges until I realised they charged us Rs350 for magazines and books, which were never provided.” After some probing, an RTI application was filed with no result initially. “Since I was out of college, I filed applications through a junior and slowly, besides getting all the facilities, they even returned Rs350 for one year to the students,” said Rahul Chaubey, resident of Ulhasnagar, who attended the forum.
Interestingly, people from slums outnumbered people from better backgrounds in filing RTI. Many of them filed the RTI queries with the help of NGOs. “I am greatly inspired by listening to these people,” said Dhiraj Darji, an engineering student who plans to file RTI on the usage of funds by his corporator.
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