Nearly five years ago, Inayat Sabhikhi’s post on this blog praised India’s Right to Information Act (RTIA) —which mandates public authorities to respond in a timely fashion to citizen requests for information—as a “remarkably effective anticorruption tool.” In contrast, last year the Supreme Court of India warned that the Act was “fast becoming a ‘dead letter law.’” What can be done to revitalize the RTIA? An important part of the answer lies in centering the rural poor—increasing awareness, affordability, and accessibility to the RTIA in India’s villages.

Given that many of the RTIA’s most lauded exposés have involved urban political corruption (see here, here, and here), it is sometimes forgotten that the law was fundamentally enacted so as to empower marginalized communities in rural India. In fact, the RTIA owes its existence to the collective efforts of activists who, throughout the 1990s, successfully campaigned to uncover local employment records to ensure fair compensation for small farmers. The RTIA’s promise in exposing rural corruption is illustrated in two cases that occurred shortly after the Act’s passage in 2005:

• In 2007, farmers in the state of Assam leveraged the RTIA to reveal irregularities in the operation of the public system for distributing food to people living below the poverty. A further investigation revealed that local officials had diverted the rice to themselves, selling it on the black market at a sevenfold price increase.
• In 2008, activists in the state of Punjab submitted RTIA applications to understand why federal money earmarked to build rural housing had not been distributed to the intended beneficiaries. As the requested reports indicated, the grants had been embezzled by village council members, who built houses for themselves. 

While these examples demonstrate that the RTIA’s potential to give rural citizens greater ability to hold local elites accountable, such examples are the exception rather than the rule. Although corruption is rampant in rural India (see here, here, here, and here), RTI requests in villages are all too rare. While 70% of India’s population lives in rural areas, barely 25% of RTI applications come from villages, and in some states that percentage is as low as 11%. In short, the communities with the most to gain from the RTIA are the ones that have used it the least.

Two reforms would help address this problem: 

• First, local governments should partner with non-governmental organizations to promote RTIA literacy. One reason so few villagers file RTIA requests is that they are simply unaware they have the power to do so. NGOs can explain to villagers how they can use the RTIA to advocate for their needs, and how to file an information request. There is already precedent for such initiatives. For example, in Uttarakhand, NGOs—with training and support from state officials—gave RTI workshops in 179 villages. Within four years, children who had attended these workshops had filed 942 RTI applications, which led to improvements in access to electricity, water, and education. Such government-NGO partnerships may also have the positive collateral effect of building community cohesion and a culture of “good governance.” For example, in rural Gujarat, local activists proactively made RTI requests they saw as useful for village residents, and the information they received was then written on the walls of government buildings (with the government’s consent). An unintentional byproduct of these efforts was an increase in civic pride by local officials, and the fostering of an image of integrity.
• Second, governments should take steps to reduce the costs of filing RTI requests. Those costs may seem low, but they can often be prohibitive for the average rural villager, especially in those cases where a follow-up is required. Governments should therefore provide fee waivers for those below the poverty line. Governments should also digitize their records and make them accessible through centralized databases throughout rural areas. This is the path taken by Odisha; its digitalization initiative has streamlined the requesting process while reducing the transactional costs typically associated with RTI requests. Finally, given that only 29% of rural India has internet access, allowing RTIA requests through telephone calls could make the RTI process more affordable and accessible to rural residents. Such a system has been used successfully in the state of Bihar since 2006. 

In short, although the RTIA can be a remarkably effective anticorruption tool. But in order to reach its full potential, rural communities must be able to reap its benefits. Fortunately, revitalizing the RTIA in rural communities should not be that hard to do, and several state and local governments have already provided useful models of how this could be done.