How Civil Society Organisations Shaped the RTI Act, 2005

The Right to Information Act of 2005 did not arrive as a gift from the government. It was won, bit by bit, over two decades by ordinary people asking extraordinary questions. Farmers, daily wage workers, activists, and journalists refused to accept that government records belonged only to officials. Their struggle, rooted in the villages of Rajasthan and carried forward by a national coalition of civil society organisations (CSOs), eventually forced Parliament to legislate what citizens had already claimed as their democratic birthright. This is the story of how that movement took shape and why it matters even today.

Why civil society had to step in 🔗

For decades after Independence, government functioning in India was governed largely by the colonial-era Official Secrets Act of 1923. Records of public expenditure, muster rolls, tenders, and files were treated as the private property of the bureaucracy. Citizens, even those whose lives were directly affected by schemes and welfare programmes, had no legal way to see how decisions were made or money spent. This opacity bred corruption on a massive scale, particularly in rural development and public works.

Political parties showed little interest in changing this arrangement. The push for transparency, therefore, had to come from outside the system. Civil society organisations, grassroots collectives, activist networks, and public-spirited intellectuals, stepped into this gap. Their work did not merely demand a law; it reshaped the very way Indians think about the relationship between a citizen and the state.

The spark in rural Rajasthan: MKSS 🔗

The most influential chapter of the RTI story was written in the drought-prone villages of central Rajasthan. In 1990, three activists, Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey, and Shankar Singh, founded the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) at a public gathering near Bhim in Rajsamand district. The organisation began with a modest goal: ensuring that rural labourers received the minimum wages they were legally entitled to under government-run public works.

As MKSS activists dug deeper into why workers were being underpaid, they kept running into the same wall. Attendance sheets, known as muster rolls, were locked away. Villagers reported working thirty days but being paid for fifteen. Names of dead people and non-existent workers filled official records, while real labourers were left unpaid. Without access to these documents, it was impossible to prove anything. The demand for wages quickly transformed into a demand for information, captured in the powerful slogan “Hamara Paisa, Hamara Hisab” (Our Money, Our Account).

Jan Sunwais: democracy under a tree 🔗

MKSS’s most original contribution was the Jan Sunwai, or public hearing. The first major Jan Sunwai was held in December 1994. The idea was disarmingly simple. Activists would obtain photocopies of official expenditure records, often with the quiet help of sympathetic bureaucrats, and then read them aloud before an assembled gathering of villagers. Workers would stand up and testify whether they had actually worked on the project, whether the listed materials had actually been delivered, and whether the named beneficiaries even existed.

The results were electrifying. Official records, when held up against lived experience, collapsed. Ghost workers, inflated bills, and diverted funds were exposed in broad daylight. These hearings drew on hard documentary evidence to back up villagers’ testimonies, and this combination of paper and voice made the exposure of corruption unusually credible. For the first time, poor villagers were not just complaining; they were auditing.

From wages to a right: the Beawar dharna 🔗

In April 1995, the then Chief Minister of Rajasthan, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, announced in the state Assembly that his government would grant citizens access to information on local development works. Months passed, and nothing happened. Exactly one year later, on 6 April 1996, MKSS launched an indefinite dharna at Chang Gate in Beawar, a small town in Ajmer district. The sit-in lasted forty days.

What made the Beawar dharna historic was the nature of the demand itself. Poor, landless, mostly uneducated workers were not asking for food, housing, or even wages. They were asking for information, an abstract right that had never before been the subject of a mass protest in India. The novelty of this demand drew journalists, lawyers, writers, and public intellectuals from across the country. Senior editors like Nikhil Chakravartty, Kuldip Nayar, and Prabhash Joshi travelled to Beawar to witness the protest. Prabhash Joshi wrote a now-famous editorial in Jansatta titled “Hum Jaanenge, Hum Jiyenge” (We will know, we will live), a line that became the rallying cry of the national RTI movement.

A month later, the dharna was extended to the state capital, Jaipur. Under pressure, the Rajasthan government announced a committee to examine implementation, and MKSS called off the protest. When government commitment lapsed again, MKSS returned in 1997 with another fifty-two-day sit-in. This iterative pressure, persistent, peaceful, and public, eventually forced legislative movement at the state level.

Building a national coalition: the NCPRI 🔗

By 1996, it was clear that a Rajasthan-only struggle would never produce a national law. Activists needed a platform that could coordinate across states, draft legislation, lobby in Delhi, and support local struggles. That year, the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI) was launched at a gathering of over a hundred activist organisations. Its stated goals were transparency in public life, empowerment of people, deepening of democracy, and fighting corruption and malgovernance.

The NCPRI brought together an extraordinary coalition, including MKSS, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), the Press Council of India (under Justice P.B. Sawant), academics, retired bureaucrats, lawyers like Prashant Bhushan, and journalists. It was not a registered NGO with donor money; it was a network of people and organisations committed to a single cause. This structure gave the campaign both moral authority and tactical flexibility.

Drafting, lobbying, and litigating 🔗

NCPRI’s work operated on three parallel tracks. First, it drafted model legislation, producing detailed recommendations on what an effective RTI law should look like. Second, it lobbied politicians, parliamentarians, and state governments. Third, when necessary, it went to court. A public interest litigation filed by Prashant Bhushan on behalf of the NCPRI and the Centre for Public Interest Litigation pushed the Supreme Court in July 2004 to set a deadline for the central government to either notify the weak Freedom of Information Act, 2002 or explain why it had not done so.

State laws as stepping stones 🔗

The national campaign was aided by a cascade of state-level victories. Tamil Nadu and Goa passed their own RTI laws in 1997. Madhya Pradesh followed in 1998. Rajasthan, Karnataka, and Maharashtra enacted laws in 2000, Delhi in 2001, and Jammu and Kashmir and Assam in 2003. Each state law was imperfect, but collectively they demonstrated two crucial points: that transparency legislation was politically feasible, and that civil society coalitions could actually translate protest into statute.

The Atal Bihari Vajpayee government passed the Freedom of Information Act, 2002, but it was never notified for implementation. NCPRI and allied civil society groups treated this as a hollow victory and continued to push for a stronger, more enforceable national law.

The final push: 2004-2005 🔗

The 2004 general election brought a change of government. The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) included a stronger RTI law in its National Common Minimum Programme. A National Advisory Council (NAC) was constituted, with Aruna Roy and economist Jean Dreze among its members, specifically to translate civil society demands into policy. The NAC, working closely with the NCPRI, submitted detailed recommendations to amend the 2002 law.

When the Right to Information Bill, 2004 was tabled in Parliament, civil society noted that it applied only to central authorities, a serious dilution of their original demand. The Bill was referred to a Parliamentary Standing Committee, which invited evidence from NCPRI members, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, and other groups. Sustained advocacy resulted in over a hundred amendments. The most important change was that the law’s jurisdiction was extended to cover the whole of India, including state governments.

The Right to Information Act, 2005 was passed by Parliament on 15 June 2005 and came into force on 12 October 2005. It was, in a genuine sense, a people’s law, drafted through years of dialogue between activists and legislators.

Why the role of civil society still matters 🔗

The RTI Act’s origin story carries lessons that go beyond its own history. Three stand out.

Grassroots legitimacy 🔗

The RTI movement was not an urban, elite project. It was born among labourers in Devdungri, Kot Kirana, and Beawar. This rural legitimacy made it difficult for any political party to openly oppose. When the demand came from the poorest, arguments about “national security” or “administrative efficiency” sounded hollow.

Innovation outside institutions 🔗

Jan Sunwais, slogans, street theatre, songs by Dalit bards, and forty-day dharnas were not tools the state would have invented. They came from communities. CSOs showed that governance innovation often originates outside formal institutions, and that public administration has much to learn from organised citizen action.

Continued vigilance 🔗

The work of civil society did not end in 2005. Aruna Roy has repeatedly warned that the RTI Act requires active defence, not passive celebration. Amendments in 2019 that changed the tenure and salary structure of Information Commissioners were resisted by the NCPRI and allied groups. More than sixty RTI activists have been killed since the Act came into force, a grim reminder that transparency in India is still contested terrain.

A people’s law, still in the making 🔗

The RTI Act is often described as one of the most powerful transparency laws in the world. That power did not come from the generosity of legislators. It came from villagers who sat through forty days of summer heat in Beawar, from activists who travelled between Delhi and Devdungri, from journalists who wrote editorials no one had asked them to write, and from a coalition that refused to accept a weak law as good enough. Civil society organisations did not just help shape the RTI Act; they made its existence possible.

What do you think? If the RTI Act was born from a grassroots struggle in rural Rajasthan rather than a top-down government initiative, does that origin give it a stronger claim on public trust than laws drafted entirely within ministries? And what role should civil society play today in protecting this hard-won right from gradual erosion?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aruna_Roy
2. https://journalism.university/media-ethics-and-laws/evolution-right-to-information-india-democracy/
3. https://www.humanrightsinitiative.org/content/state-level-rti-rajasthan
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazdoor_Kisan_Shakti_Sangathan
5. https://grassrootsjusticenetwork.org/resources/is-knowledge-power-the-right-to-information-campaign-in-india/
6. https://www.humanrightsinitiative.org/content/national-level-rti
7. https://humanrightsinitiative.org/programs/ai/rti/india/national/2006/ncpri_const_&_info_brochure.pdf
8. https://idronline.org/features/idr-interviews/interview-with-aruna-roy-social-activist-and-an-architect-of-indias-rti-act/