/ 24 February 2004

Opening up rural India

Initially they stood at the back of the gathering, arms folded, but looking confident — smiling, jesting with one another. The ration dealers of rural Rajasthan — or, at least, of one small part of this giant Indian state. But this was a day of reckoning; soon they were to be called to account, shaken off their smug perches.

Granted licences by the state authority, these men are supposed to provide grain and other basic products to the poorest citizens under a public distribution system. But many of them cheat and exploit. In response to issues such as this, a state-wide social movement has grown over the past 17 years — the Movement for the Rights of Peasants and Workers (MKSS).

About 400 people gathered on January 30, nestled by the bend of the river as it enters the village of Kumbhalgarh, a sea of brightly coloured shawls and saris. Although the majority were women, it was a man who first came forward to the microphone. La Singh Rawat’s message was direct: “I am told that my ration book says that I was given 35kg of grain on January 4. But I was not. I collected some kerosene and the ration dealer made a second entry. I signed with my thumbprint as I do not read or write.”

Under the umbrella slogan “The Right to Know is the Right to Live”, the MKSS fought in the 1990s for a right to information law. Once the law was passed in 2000 the MKSS turned it into an activist tool for social control and economic justice.

Though implementing it requires massive energy and the commitment of many volunteers, the core methodology is uncomplicated. The MKSS takes an issue and makes requests for the relevant public records under the information law. It then calls the people of a panchayat (group of villages) to a jun sunwai (public hearing) where people come forward and have their say. Government officials are invited to attend.

Singh Rawat is officially designated as “destitute”, which means that he is supposed to get the full entitlement. In fact, the evidence shows that he has been serially ripped off by the ration dealers. Barely had he finished making his simple point when all hell broke loose. The ration dealers had stealthily made their way around the side of the meeting and with the swift pounce of jaguars had surrounded him and the microphone, which mysteriously no longer worked. Someone had cut the electricity cable.

It took 25 minutes to quell the disturbance. One of the three founders of the MKSS, Aruna Roy, sat close by, as tranquil as ever. “Even though we called the meeting, it is not our responsibility to restore public order. That is the state’s job,” she said. Later, after the hearing was complete, she shared her inner doubts: “There is always an element of unpredictability. Will the people show up? Will they speak out? There is always an element of drama when you confront authority.”

Now the leader of the ration dealers came forward, one Arjun Lal Baheti — “Mr Hawk Nose”, someone muttered; “I call him The Snake,” whispered one of the MKSS’s volunteers, who had spent the previous four weeks preparing for the event. The ration book says he got 35kg and so does the official record, Mr Hawk Nose/Snake/Lal Baheti told the assembly. “So what? It is one man’s word against another.”

This proved to be a massive tactical blunder. With practiced assurance, the other two founders of the MKSS, Nikhil Dey and Shankar Singh, began their forensic double act. The one read from a vast pile of ration books; the other from the official records that had been obtained under the Access to Information Act from the ration dealers. (Reluctantly, they had only been compelled to hand them over about 24 hours before the hearing.)

The records did not match; instead they proved endemic corruption. For example, 29 of the dealers’ registers showed ration distribution, but the corresponding ration books were empty. “Although they tried to intimidate the villagers in the days leading up to the hearing,” said Dey later, “they had not had time to alter the records to cover up.”

Further testimony was periodically added from the crowd. The ration dealers stood aside, arms still folded, but quiet now. No smiles or jesting. During the earlier skirmish, the local magistrate had put them in their place: “Everyone has the right to speak. The MKSS is doing nothing more than trying to help us find out what is really going on.” Whether he had heard the women singing as they sat watching while the men jostled I do not know. But his statement matched their simple lyric. “We have the right to speak out,” they sang.

What the hearings do is set the official record — the records accessed under the access to information law — against the real life record of the people. (Was it Gandhi who said the truth will set you free?) Freedom of information, as it used to be known, was a “luxury right” for journalists and such like. Not any more. The previous day we had watched as women in Kelwara village, three hours further north, had provided a collective public audit of the state of the local hospital and the public health service.

“Our money, our accounts,” sang the crowd. Fifteen of the 30 beds that were supposed to be in the hospital were found in the homes of the hospital staff; pregnant women had been sent away to private practices to deliver their children; men bitten by dogs had not been given the requisite 14 injections, even though the official records that adorned the walls of the meeting said they had.

A week before, in Delhi, we had cogitated around the core meaning and value of the concept of “transparency” — one of those enervating buzzwords of the “good governance” heterodoxy — blithely mouthed by thousands of conference-goers and consultants the world over. We had decided that because transparency is a means and not an end in itself, it was about creating “political space”.

Kumbhalgarh proved the point. The activist use of the transparency law had created an opportunity for poor people, habitually excluded by poverty and lack of information, to tackle those with power over them. A microcosm of class and power relations everywhere, civil society had sat at the feet of the private sector — in this case the holders of the contracted-out public distribution service — and government, and the people had won out.

The government officials, spouting words of thanks to the MKSS left with a truckload of ration books and the official records, to initiate legal proceedings and reforms of the system.

Transposing this system to South Africa, or anywhere else, will not necessarily be easy. It is not for the faint-hearted. South Africa’s Open Democracy Advice Centre has begun to apply the MKSS model in the much-exploited fishing communities of the West Coast, using the Promotion of Access to Information Act, and plans to expand its fieldwork. Other NGOs, such as the Public Service Accountability Monitor, use the law to expose corruption in the provincial government.

Back in rural Rajasthan, the ration dealers slunk away. Two days later, several of them had their licences rescinded. Often real life is more satisfying than fiction. Kumbhalgarh was a crucible of truth, one that would have pressed the dramatic genius of Arthur Miller. But as Roy says, “It is theatre, yes. The only thing is that the theatre leads to concrete ends — it is not just drama for its own sake.”

Richard Calland is a member of Professor Joseph Stiglitz’s International Task Team on Transparency, which visited Rajasthan in January