Times of India: Ahmedabad: Friday, October 25, 2013.
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SALT-MAN’S SABRE: He is
poor and illiterate, yet Gabharu Parmar, 50, understands the power of RTI better
than most people. The salt seller from Moti Barman village in Amreli, Gujarat,
filed his first query when some upper caste villagers built shops just outside
his house, blocking access. The reply showed it was government land and the
shops were demolished within days. Since then, he has filed many RTIs to resolve
local issues and advises others to do the same. “I no longer feel like a lesser
human,” says Parmar, who travels from village to village with his herd of
donkeys, selling sacks of salt. “Because of RTI, I feel like Shaktiman.”
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Over the last two weeks, it was a slew of online
and offline activities, all dedicated to propagating the RTI culture across the
country. The I Lead India RTI Day campaign began on October 12, the day on
which the Right to Information Act had come into force eight years ago. In an
unprecedented initiative,The Times of India held how-to-do-it RTI workshops in
18 cities, from Thiruvananthapuram to Guwahati and Srinagar to Ahmedabad.
Hundreds of people participated in the workshops, held in partnership with the
National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI). The response in
some of the cities (Mumbai, Hyderabad, Delhi, Chennai and Bangalore) was
overwhelming, while the very organization of the workshop was an achievement in
some Srinagar and Guwahati).
Another major offline activity was a seminar in
New Delhi on Thursday, the penultimate day of the campaign. The subject of the
seminar, addressed by RTI stalwarts, could not have been more topical: the move
to keep political parties outside the ambit of RTI. The Bill meant to dilute
RTI for this purpose constitutes the latest threat to what has emerged as the
most popular law ever enacted in India. The ongoing battle has given a
political edge to the I Lead India campaign in which the Youth Parliament
initiative was followed by the RTI one. This was no uncanny coincidence; the
sequence captured the irony of the political class seeking to undo its own good
work, which has just been adjudged as the second-best RTI law in the world.
As a token of its continuing engagement with RTI,
TOI also organized a Google Hangout on Thursday with RTI experts Venkatesh
Nayak and Amrita Johri. This served to clarify doubts people have expressed on
how to leverage RTI for personal and public causes.
The grand culmination of this nationwide exercise
is to mobilize hundreds of first-timers to file RTI applications today (October
25). One of its enduring legacies is a website on RTI, complete with sample
application forms and case studies. The initiative, while not being a channel
for submitting RTI applications, has emerged as a catalyst and a helpline.
For a law that evolved from the demands raised by
the poor in rural areas, RTI has been embraced by people of all segments,
lending a new depth to Indian democracy. The I Lead India RTI Day initiative is
based on the premise that the citizen’s duty to democracy is no more confined
to casting a vote once in five years. The engagement has to be continuous:
those holding positions of authority have to be held to account all through and
RTI is the instrument for it. The message that is spreading is empowering: Do
your duty to the country by filing RTI applications on a regular basis,
especially on issues of collective importance.
There is a new variant of Descarte’s famous quote:
I think, therefore I am. As an RTI poster aptly put it, “I ask, therefore I
am.”
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