On Thursday October 20th, Arvind Kejriwal spoke at an event convened by the Pittsburgh chapter of the Association for Indian Development on the effects of the new national Right to Information law recently enacted in India, similar to the United States' Freedom of Information Act. Arvind Kejriwal worked in the Indian Revenue Service for a number of years in the 1990s, and from that experience became determined to work to end corruption through greater government transparency. He founded Parivartan - a Delhi based citizens? movement trying to ensure a just, transparent and accountable governance- in 2000, and worked in the campaign for the national right to information law that was enacted in October 2005.

In 1976, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the Right to Information is a fundamental right for all Indians.

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The movement for a Right to Information law was sparked in 1990 when workers in Rajasthan, who were being denied their full wage by corrupt officials pocketing part of the money, demanded to see the accounts that documented their labor and pay. That protest snowballed into a national peoples' movement.

Kejriwal said that Aruna Roy, an esteemed social justice crusader in India who founded the social justice organization Majdoor Kishan Shakti Sanghatan, was instrumental in the movement, and that the support of Sonia Gandhi finally enabled the law to be passed in October 2005. Sonia Gandhi, no relation to Mahatma Gandhi, is the widow of the grandson of India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the leader of the major political party Indian National Congress.

Kejriwal described the provisions of the Right-to-Information Act, one of the most progressive in the world.

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The Indian law differs from the United States' Freedom of Information Act in several ways. The Indian law provides a standard fee for all requests, while the FOIA law allows the relevant agency to assess the cost of the request and pass that on to the requestee, unless they meet specific criteria for a fee waiver. Both laws contain a provision for appeal; in the Indian law, it is a special Information Bureau agent who reviews the appeal, while in the U.S., the same agency reviews the appeal. The Indian law requires that the request be filled within 30 days, while the FOIA has no time limit, and users often find substantial delays due to a backlog of requests or government inaction. Both laws have provisions for withholding information related to National Security; the interpretation of this clause has not yet been tested in India.

The National Right to Information law was enacted so recently that its operation is still being developed and its powers tested. However, 9 states in India passed Right to Information laws at earlier dates. Arvind Kejriwal described Parivarthan's experience using the law in Delhi.

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Parivathan has seen hundreds of cases with similar outcomes. Kejriwal described a campaign to raise awareness of the Right to Information law that has resulted in 22,000 applications being filed for every type of government service, including old age pensions, food distribution, electricity, passports, and road maintenance.

Kejriwal gave another example of the use of the law to bring about reform in a low-income food distribution program in Delhi. The government gives out ration cards to low income people, and sells food staples such as wheat and rice to a network of privately owned "ration shops" at highly subsidized rates. The ration shops are then supposed to distribute the food to those with ration cards. However, in Delhi, the shopkeepers were instead selling the wheat and rice on the black market. In many areas of the city the shopkeepers actually closed their shops completely and told the people that the government had stopped the food distribution program, while in fact the entire supply was being siphoned off by the shopkeepers for profit. Parivarthan helped a woman named Triveni (tri-VAY-nee) to submit a Right-to-Know application.

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Based on the records returned with the Right to Information requests, Parivarthan calculated that 93% of the wheat and 97% of the rice in the food distribution system in Delhi was being diverted. This put a tremendous sum of money at stake, and the shopkeepers whose interests were threatened by public knowledge of the corruption retaliated:

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Kejriwal also described an example of how Parivarthan used the Right to Information Act to affect policy making at the highest levels of government.

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Kejriwal described in detail how the records released under the Right to Information Act request showed that the World Bank had forced the Delhi government to violate its own contracting policies in order to favor a particular company, which would have profited tremendously from the privatization. Parivarthan made the information public and gave it to a number of professors at Indian universities and prominent academic societies, who in turn voiced their opposition to the Prime Minister.

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http://media.indypgh.org/uploads/2006/10/rustbelt-2006-10-23.mp3

http://indypgh.org/news/2006/10/24980.php#India_s_Sunshine_Laws