Infocracy India: Become a social lawyer and community journalist.

legallyindia; Monday, 14 March 2011,

A man walks along a beach, picks up a starfish and flings it into the ocean. He does it with all the starfish he finds. Someone asks him: “Hey! There are thousands of starfish here. What difference are you making?” The man bends down, picks up another starfish and flings it into the ocean. “It makes difference to this one.”

Freeing information:

The Right to Information (RTI) exercised and replicated across regions turns instances into movements. Many movements have been constructed around the RTI Act and most of them have yielded transformative results.

Infocracy India is a new initiative to carry this proactive tradition forward and use law students and media to bring consequential change in our society and build more accountable and transparent spaces.

Law students will become RTI activists in a proactive and sustained manner, getting trained in community journalism and social lawyering as they go along.

We also want to create a resource database which any information-seeker can use to form a community to focus meaningful attention on the issues the group takes up.

Infocracy will also help poor and illiterate persons – and not just Indian citizens to file RTIs vicariously and seek information that could help bring some justice for the most marginalised and voiceless.

The Infocracy India website at www.infocracyindia.org will be a collaborative platform where anyone can pitch RTI ideas, share RTI experiences, download RTI applications, search RTI results and witness the impact of RTI. Everything will be available for free download and we hope this will assist and encourage others to exercise their rights. 

The website will also help anyone file an RTI by filling in a simple form or making a phone call.

The Infocracy website and others will also carry stories on RTI results and impact to create an open group of investigative, community journalists.

• RTI APPLICATIONS: Drafting an action-oriented rigorous RTI application is a craft which can be learnt and having success with RTIs is an artform. Tell us about the RTI application you filed and we’ll be publishing some good ones for free download.
• RTI RESULTS: We’ll be sharing the information we get via RTI applications filed by our student journalists with readers on Legally India and Lawctopus.
• RTI IMPACT: Did the RTI application create the desired impact? What do the people feel about the change? Documenting the change and presenting it to the media and public in concise readable formats will help build strong and self-sustaining community support around the issues we take up.