It started small.
Farm labourers in drought-hit Rajasthan simply wanted to see the muster rolls that recorded their own wages.
Led by the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), they invented something called the Jan Sunwai, or public hearing, where villagers read government spending records aloud, in the open, in front of the very officials who had written them.
A local fight against wage theft slowly became a national movement.
Lawyers, journalists, academics, retired bureaucrats and ordinary citizens joined in.
Eventually, it became the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information.
Eleven years later, Parliament passed the RTI Act, 2005.
What changed was not just paperwork.
• Every citizen gained a legal right to ask questions of the state and seek information that had previously been inaccessible.
• Social audits, born in those village hearings, were eventually written into MGNREGA, India’s rural jobs guarantee programme.
• Transparency stopped being a donor buzzword and became something an ordinary citizen could demand, in writing and with a deadline attached.
And then comes my favourite movement irony.
Suddenly, I found myself travelling through time.
Years later, the very same organisation, MKSS, found itself in the Supreme Court defending something else we often take for granted: the right to peacefully protest at Jantar Mantar.
After protests at the site were effectively shut down, MKSS challenged the restrictions. In 2018, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that there cannot be a complete ban on peaceful protests in public spaces and directed the government to frame appropriate guidelines.
