Several Bay Area Indian-American organizations came together Monday to host a public talk and discussion about India's Right to Information act, that country's equivalent of the Freedom to Information Act here in the United States. Arvind Kejriwal is an Indian social activist and a crusader for greater transparency in governance. He was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Emergent Leadership award in 2006 for activating India's Right to Information movement at the grassroots and for empowering the poorest citizens to fight corruption by holding the government answerable to the people. The Magsaysay Awards are often referred to as the Asian Nobels, and this year's Nobel Peace Prize awardee, Mohammed Yunus from India's neighbor, Bangladesh, is a former awardee himself.

The Right to Information Act 2005 is a law enacted by the Parliament of India giving Indians access to Government records. Under the terms of the Act, any citizen of India may request a department of the Central Government, State Government, or a Public Sector company or bank for information on almost any question related to the department or company's functioning. The Act also requires government bodies to publish certain specified information on their web sites.

While the RTI Act is widely heralded as a tool to contain corruption in public life, it is also significant for its affirmation of the basic principle of the government's accountability to its people. RTI also underscores the idea that democratic governance requires an informed citizenry, and that a lack of transparency in government works to conceal the operation of vested interests against the public interest. By facilitating the public's participation in governance, RTI could potentially lead the way to a truly participatory democracy.

In his career as a civil servant, Arvind Kejriwal was instrumental to bringing in a number of changes to increase transparency in the Income Tax office. Later, as the founder of the civil society group Parivartan and while working with activists such as Aruna Roy, Sandeep Pandey etc., he campaigned for the Right to Information Act, which was finally passed in 2005. Later in July 2006, he spearheaded an awareness campaign for RTI across India which included conducting workshops to educate the public on how to avail the law.

Many individuals and groups in the Indian and Indian-American community have closely followed the campaign around the RTI Act. The Bay Area chapter of the Association for India's Development (AID), for example, sponsored a series of public workshops in Tamil Nadu on the RTI, says Sudarshan Suresh, a member of the organization. Suresh also referred to AID's protests against the recent attempts by the Indian government to amend the RTI in ways that would have significantly undermined the law's ability to act as a tool of accountability. The proposed amendments led in India to a popular campaign at the national level that included Gandhian hunger strikes by anti-corruption crusaders, Padma Bhushan, Shri Anna Hazare, as well as another Magsaysay awardee, Bay Area alum Sandeep Pandey. Finally, in August 2006, in response to mass protests, and in a major victory for the ideals of a free and open society, the Indian government withdrew the proposed Amendments to the Right to Information Act and promised to follow the democratic process in any future action on this issue.

The organizations hosting the talk were the Association for India's Development (AID)'s Bay Area Chapter, the Friends of South Asia (FOSA), Asha for Education-Bay Area Chapters and Prajanet