Fruits of equality still to reach 'mango people'

The Times of India: New Delhi: Monday, October 29, 2012.

This may have been the year of the 'mango people' , but there's still a long way to go. Civil society movements that emerged in this last year have taken a big step towards giving the common man a platform and a voice, but empowerment and raising awareness remain an unfinished agenda in India.

Awareness helps people know of the dangers they need to guard against and the opportunities available to them, and empowerment offers them means to access these opportunities. Yet in India, many stumbling blocks exist for marginalized groups - what Nobel laureate and development economist Amartya Sen has called the 'conversion handicap' , something that impedes people from achieving their capabilities . In India, this could be caste, where a dalit applicant for a private sector job is turned down on account of his surname, or gender, where a girl student who is harassed on her way to college drops out.

Crimes against women, especially sexual crimes, have shocked people across the country recently. Every 20 minutes a woman in India is raped, yet the conviction rate continues to fall and is now down to one out of every four cases, even as pendency in courts rises.

Guaranteed equal rights as men in the Constitution, women are treated unequally, right from the moment of conception. The 2011 Census shows that far from abating, the preference for male children as exhibited through sex-selective abortions of female babies has only grown, now touching even formerly egalitarian states and communities. Even while girls outperform boys in school examinations year after year, they are less likely to be enrolled, complete school and move on to higher education than their brothers. As adults, they often face domestic violence and do not have equal voice as their husbands in household and economic decisions.

Many of these are crimes against dalit women. India's scheduled castes continue to be subject to crimes based on their caste alone, and ostracisation and humiliation remain rampant, particularly in rural India. They also face difficulties in filing police complaints or getting a fair trial.

Through a combination of expanded political representation and strong grassroots activism , there is, however, growing empowerment of historically marginalised groups. Across the country, peaceful protests against the taking over of rural - especially tribal - lands for private commercial use or for big infrastructure projects have exploded. Earlier this month, 60,000 landless people under the banner of the Ekta Parishad captured the national imagination by marching from Gwalior towards Delhi seeking a better land policy and provision of land for the landless poor. A new Land Acquisition Act to replace the 1894 law currently in force continues to hang fire.

The fight for greater transparency in official dealings has been strengthened this year by movements against corruption and reporting and investigations on scams. One of the most powerful weapons in the common man's arsenal is the Right To Information Act, brought in by the UPA in 2005. However activists caution that the Act is being compromised. For one, there is the issue of backlogs: nearly one million RTI applications are filed annually, and 1,300 appeals are pending before the Central Information Commission alone. More recently , activists have raised an alarm over what they view as judicial interference in the RTI. The Supreme Court recently directed that appeals in the state and central information commissions be heard by two-member benches comprising information commissioners from judicial and expert backgrounds. Former central information commissioner Shailesh Gandhi has warned that such a move will exacerbate the backlog in information commissions and render them irrelevant for most common citizens.

Organizations working for social justice help marginalized groups become more aware of their rights and better lobby for their demands. Abolition of manual scavenging, social security, especially pension for unorganized workers, and greater people participation in policy-making are issues that have been in focus over the past year.

Information: Now more powerful than money ?

The Right To Information can help people get answers from an unresponsive bureaucracy, but what if it could do more than that? Could it clean up the system? A study by two Yale political scientists shows that this might just be true. Leonid V Peisakhin and Paul Pinto, two PhD candidates at Yale University's department of political science, conducted a field experiment in a Delhi slum among residents who were trying to apply for a ration card. Peisakhin and Pinto found that putting in an application for a ration card and then filing an RTI request checking on its status was almost as effective as paying a bribe! Most significantly, when poor people filed an RTI request, it erased the class disadvantage they otherwise faced, and their applications were cleared as fast as those of the middle class.