The
Telegraph: Calcutta: Friday, 01 January 2016.
BASANT RAWAT
IN RANGPAR R atna Ala couldn't see their faces but the mocking laughter rang in
his ears. " What use is information for a blind man? Get lost, son,"
the sarpanch said to a chorus of guffaws.
That moment
changed the now 39- year- old Ala's life, turning a mild- mannered, disabled
herdsman in Kathiawad into a Right to Information crusader feared by the mafia
and corrupt officials alike.
This was
sometime in 2007. Ala had been listening to a radio programme on the RTI Act,
enforced since October 2005, and was impressed. " Why don't I do something
about my problem?" he thought.
So he turned
up at the local panchayat office in Rangpar, 40km from Rajkot, to ask why they
weren't repairing the rutted village road he was finding difficult to
negotiate.
" Their
rudeness deeply disturbed me. But it made me think," Ala told this
newspaper.
He wondered
how much a man who could only read Braille do. Ala had lost his father at 15
and studied till Class X with help from a philanthropic organisation.
So, when he
learnt about the RTI helpline run by the Ahmedabad- based NGO Mahiti Adhikar
Gujarat Pahel, the first question he asked Pangti Jog, one of its officials,
was: " Can a blind man file an RTI plea?" " Of course, why
not?" she assured him before teaching him how to draft an RTI application.
Since then,
Ala has been unstoppable.
The reply to
his first RTI query told him the village road had been repaired twice in the
past two years. On paper, that is.
Ala got a
local newspaper in Rajkot, 40km away, to publish the story, and the road was
repaired soon.
The same
year, 2007, Ala prevented 281 acres of village pastures from being illegally
handed over to a clock factory by local officials. In 2010, he exposed
Rangpar's incorrect voter list braving threats from a political group that
thrived on bogus voting.
" A
friend told me that when he went to correct his name on the voter list, he saw
many names without photographs," Ala said.
His RTI plea
revealed that the rolls carried the names of 35 who had left the village and 10
who had died.
A grateful
Rangpar fielded him as a people's candidate in the local polls three years ago
and elected him its deputy sarpanch unopposed, sending him to the office from
where he had returned insulted five years earlier.
He then found
out that the mining mafia was " scooping out moram , a soft gravel",
from village grazing land at night.
" They
had political patronage and tried all kinds of tactics," he said. "
Some people came to my home in my absence and warned my wife Ila that since
both of us are blind, they would eliminate us and nobody would be the
wiser." Like the former sarpanch, they would soon learn that abusing his
blindness only helped stiffen Ala's resolve. So they tried a new tack, offering
to build Ala a two- storey house.
" My
fight goes on," the 12- bigha owner said in the two- room thatched house
he shares with Ila and school- going sons Ajay and Ashish, a few yards from a
polished village road that stands witness to how Ala humbled the scoffers.
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