RTI magic wand for villagers

For thousands of people in our villages there is a vital connection, the RTI Act can help expose leakages in works carried out under NREGA. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: May 23, 2008, 03:00:36 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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For lawmakers there may not be any link between two central laws — the Right to Information Act (RTI) and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). But for thousands of people in our villages there is a vital connection — the RTI Act can help expose leakages in works carried out under NREGA.

The method is simple. Once the information is obtained, villagers use it to conduct social audits to verify if work shown as completed in official records was actually done. If flaws are detected, the villagers lodge complaints with senior government officials.

Magsaysay Award winning social activist Sandeep Pandey said that while the RTI Act empowers citizens to seek information in the public interest, NREGA allows them to conduct social audits of the work carried out. "Using both the Acts in tandem can help expose corruption," said RTI activist Aruna Roy who had used the two laws to bring out irregularities in implementation of NREGA in Rajasthan.

In some areas of Rajasthan, social audits on the basis of information obtained under RTI has proved to be of help to villagers. "Using the two laws, villagers have been able to get their legal right to wages and the minimum 100 days of work (as mandated in NREGA)," Roy said.

This week Pandey and his colleagues started social audits on information provided to villager Yashwant Rao in Miyaganj block in Unnao district of UP 18 months after he had filed an RTI application. Rao was asked to deposit Rs 1.58 lakh by the block development officials for information about development works in 66 gram sabhas under NREGA. He finally got the information on the orders of the Uttar Pradesh Chief Information Commissioner.

In Delhi, another Magsaysay Award winner, RTI activist Arvind Kejriwal, is using the RTI to expose corruption in road construction. "Through RTI we have picked samples of a road in Model Town, north Delhi, in the presence of municipal engineers to find out if the quality of material used in road construction was right. Such attempts by us earlier had exposed corruption in road construction," he said.

With the success of the RTI in exposing leakages in government programmes, Roy, Pandey and Kejriwal want social auditing to be made mandatory for every government programme. "It not only helps in exposing corruption but in NREGA we have found it also acts as a deterrent," Roy said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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