Aruna Roy usually carries a couple of hand-made bags into which she invariably digs for booklets whenever people ask her details about India's path-finding law for citizens - the Right to Information Act.
The social activist -- recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay award for community leadership in 2000 -- believes that information is power and therefore must be sought. "Seek for yourself, don't just depend on what I am saying," Roy insisted while handing out pamphlets of the Right to Information Act, 2005, to those gathered for her speech at the Sri Lanka Press Institute (SLPI) in Colombo on Tuesday.
Roy was in the island for a day on the invitation of SLPI and the Editors' Guild - groups that have been eagerly campaigning for a similar piece of legislation in Sri Lanka. The 63-year-old Roy is one of the pioneers of India's right to information movement which dates back to more than two decades. India in the early 1990s had witnessed various civil society struggles for the right to know about how central and state governments spent taxpayers' money. Roy, who was a bureaucrat till the mid-1970s and had seen the system from within, then took activism to the grassroots.
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| Aruna Roy |
Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKKS) in central Rajasthan was born out of a "fight against feudalism". While the MKKS is essentially a non-government organisation of workers and farmers, Roy and her friends had turned it into a platform where Rajasthan's rural poor organised themselves to demand legislation for the right to information in the Northwestern Indian state.
By 1994, the MKKS had realised that people had to be legally empowered to access information even from local government institutions such as panchayats - a village council.
Recalling the movement's early days when bureaucrats and politicians had allegedly ridiculed the MKKS as a "bunch of nothings", Ms. Roy said: "Back then, they did not realise that our struggle would become strong. Or else, they would have nipped it in the bud."
After years of struggle by the MKKS and other activists, the Rajasthan state assembly in May 2000 finally passed a right to information law. However, Rajasthan is not the first state to legislate a right to information law. Neither was it the last. Between 1996 and 2003, several Indian states had passed legislation to this effect. However, the campaign broke into a gallop only after the Rajasthan success.
History was created in India in July 2005 when Parliament passed a Right to Information Act.
The 2005 national law -- which does not apply to Jammu and Kashmir because of the special status the territory enjoys within the Indian constitution -- guarantees access to information regarding public institutions which have been defined in it as entities established by or under the Indian Constitution, by or any law made by the Indian Parliament or the state assemblies or through notifications by the appropriate government or enterprises that are owned, controlled or substantially financed directly or indirectly by the appropriate government.
Even NGOs which receive substantial government funds are open to public scrutiny under this act. The private sector has, however, been kept out of the act's ambit. So have certain intelligence and security institutions of the central government.
One cannot access information about the Research and Analysis Wing, India's intelligence arm, or the Cabinet Secretariat, for instance. There are 18 such central government establishments which have been excluded from the purview of the act unless information is sought on allegations of corruption or human rights violations by any of the concerned institutions.
"Checks and balances are necessary in every law," says Roy adding that the transparency of government functions, the ability of people to make informed choices, making public institutions accountable and having legal frameworks to protect peoples' rights were important for the health of any democracy. Even with its limitations, the Right to Information Act, 2005, has given India's middle class a vital tool and made the public service more efficient.
India's landmark legislation might have enthused media and social activists in Sri Lanka where a draft freedom of information bill was anyway prepared in 2003 by a committee chaired by the then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. The drafting committee met in the chambers of the then Attorney General K. C. Kamalasabeyson. Among those who participated in the drafting of the Bill were the then Justice Ministry Secretary Dhara Wijetilleke, officials from the Legal Draftsman's Department, the Editors' Guild, the Free Media Movement and their lawyers and legal advisers.
This draft, which is gathering dust though it has been passed by the then Cabinet in 2004, is available in the public domain, and it reads: "... there is a need to foster a culture of transparency and accountability in public and private bodies by giving effect to the right of access to information and thereby actively promote a society in which the people of Sri Lanka have effective access to information to enable them to more fully exercise and protect all their rights."
Unfortunately, this vital bill that promotes democracy and empowers people, was not tabled in Parliament. According to Article 19, a UK-based group campaigning for the right to freedom of expression, "Sri Lanka does not have a freedom of information law or even strong provisions in other laws that facilitate information disclosure."
This it had said in its 2001 survey on the right to information in South Asia. Foreign NGOs alone have not expressed concern in this regard.
"There is a lack of meaningful emphasis on constitutional and legal mechanisms such as the right to information to strengthen professional media in Sri Lanka and through it, accountability and transparency in government...," writes a senior researcher for the Centre for Policy Alternatives in a report on media freedom in Sri Lanka.
It has been 61 years since the United Nations general assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 19 of this declaration reads: "everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
The intensification of the war between Sri Lankan security forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the recent past had changed much in this country's socio-political arena. "Conflicts are resolved only when people trust the government. And, trust can be created only when there is transparency in the government. Justice must be seen to be done," says Roy speaking about how the right to information campaign might help heal different sections of Sri Lanka's post-war society.
Some anecdotes from Aruna Roy's lecture on Tuesday:
Social worker and human rights activist Aruna Roy and her group was holding a media conference in New Delhi. On the head table was a village woman from Rajastan. She was clad not in the usual saree, but a dress a typical Rajastani village woman would wear.
When the journalists asked her why she was at the head table and what had she go to do with the campaign for the right to information, the woman said:
"If I give Rs. 10 to my son and asked to buy some vegetables in the market, won't I ask for accounts when he comes back? Similarly, when the government spends my money, won't I have the right to ask it how it spends my money?"
When the Right to Information Act came into force, many public sector institutions got active. A council in Rajasthan had allocated funds to build a veterinary clinic and the council records showed it had been built. But in reality it was not there. Once the Right to Information Act came into full force, the council rushed in to build a veterinary clinic on the first floor of a building with a narrow staircase, fearing an array of petitions under the new law.
The local people were happy that at last they got a veterinary clinic. But they wondered how to take their sick bulls and buffaloes along the narrow stair case to be treated by the vets.
Since 2005, more than 400,000 people have invoked the Right to Information Act in India for various reasons. A survey shows that the Dalits and women have invoked it to win their rights back while others have made use of it to obtain what is rightfully theirs.
Prior to the Act came into force, people got shabby treatment at some police stations. Now they offer a cup of tea to any person who, empowered by the Act, demands information from the police.
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