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: 

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