Using RTI to Improve Access to Government Schemes for Marginalised Communities

Information is power, but for India’s most marginalised communities, accessing government records has historically been a maze of application forms, bureaucratic indifference, and endless waiting. The Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005 changed this equation by giving citizens a legal lever to pry open public records. When paired with digital tools like information kiosks, mobile monitoring apps, and dedicated transparency portals, the RTI has become a practical bridge between welfare schemes on paper and entitlements actually reaching the poor. This post explores how that bridge is being built, with a special focus on the MGNREGA ecosystem in Rajasthan.

Why the RTI matters for the marginalised 🔗

For Dalits, Adivasis, landless labourers, women-headed households, and other historically disadvantaged groups, government schemes are often the difference between subsistence and destitution. Yet these are precisely the groups most likely to be denied their due because of opaque record-keeping, middlemen, and discretion at the local level. The RTI Act was designed to break this cycle by making the flow of information a matter of right rather than favour.

The 2nd Administrative Reforms Commission famously called the RTI “the master key for good governance,” and for good reason. In rural areas, the law has helped people access records related to MGNREGA wages, land entitlements, and healthcare services, enabling them to challenge exclusion and corruption. When scholarships, ration cards, or pensions are diverted to ineligible recipients, an RTI application is often the only non-judicial tool a poor citizen has to demand answers.

From passive beneficiaries to active claimants 🔗

The deeper shift the RTI enables is psychological and political, not just administrative. It transforms people from passive recipients of “sarkari” benefits into active claimants of legal entitlements. When a labourer in a remote panchayat can ask for the muster roll of a worksite and match it against who actually turned up, the balance of power tilts. This is the core insight that civil society movements in Rajasthan built upon long before the RTI Act was even enacted.

The Rajasthan story: Where the RTI movement began 🔗

Much of the modern RTI movement in India traces its roots to central Rajasthan, where the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) was founded in 1990 in Devdungri by activists Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey, Shankar Singh, and local villagers. MKSS began organising around a deceptively simple issue: workers on drought relief sites were being cheated out of their legal minimum wages through fake muster rolls and opaque record-keeping.

The organisation’s innovation was the Jan Sunwai, or public hearing. Official documents obtained through informal pressure (and later through formal RTI) were read out publicly so that villagers could identify ghost workers and fake entries. Discrepancies between paper records and lived reality were exposed in front of the very officials responsible. This grassroots practice eventually seeded two landmark laws: the RTI Act of 2005 and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in 2005.

Social audit as a statutory right 🔗

MGNREGA is unusual among Indian laws because it makes the conduct of social audits a mandatory legal provision. Section 17 of the Act, read with the Operational Guidelines, requires that every work undertaken be subject to scrutiny by the Gram Sabha. This transforms the RTI from an individual legal tool into a community-level accountability mechanism. An application for records is just the first step; the real power lies in reading those records out loud in the village and asking pointed questions.

ICT as a force multiplier: Kiosks, portals and handheld devices 🔗

A legal right is only useful if people can actually exercise it. For a labourer in a remote block with limited literacy and no internet connection, filing an RTI application is not a trivial task. This is where Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has played a transformative role, especially in Rajasthan.

Information kiosks in local languages 🔗

Physical information kiosks set up at panchayat offices, block offices, and worksites are designed to bring scheme information directly to people who cannot navigate websites or government buildings. These kiosks typically operate in Hindi and local dialects, use icon-based interfaces for low-literacy users, and allow residents to check job card details, wage payments, and pending applications. Civil society groups have played a key role here too; the RTI Manch initiative ran kiosks at multiple public locations in Jaipur that reached over 1,200 people in a single year, training citizens in how to file RTI applications and track NREGA entitlements.

The Jan Soochna Portal: Proactive disclosure at scale 🔗

In 2019, Rajasthan launched the Jan Soochna Portal (JSP), which represents a quantum leap in proactive disclosure. The portal operationalises Section 4 of the RTI Act, which requires public authorities to voluntarily publish information so that citizens do not need to file formal applications. When it was inaugurated, JSP covered 13 departments and roughly 30 government schemes, including public distribution, farm loans, pensions, MGNREGA beneficiary data, and medical insurance. Today the portal hosts information on hundreds of schemes across over a hundred departments.

For marginalised users, the portal removes multiple barriers at once. There is no application fee, no 30-day wait, no risk of rejection citing exemptions, and no need to know which officer handles which file. A villager can simply walk into an E-Mitra centre, ask the operator to pull up the MGNREGA muster roll for her panchayat, and immediately verify whether the attendance and wages recorded match what actually happened on the ground.

The Janmanrega citizen-centric mobile app 🔗

At the national level, the Ministry of Rural Development has launched complementary tools. Janmanrega, developed jointly with the National Informatics Centre and the National Remote Sensing Centre, allows citizens to locate geotagged MGNREGA assets on a map interface provided by ISRO’s Bhuvan platform. A villager can see whether the well or check dam officially built in her village actually exists, and whether it was built where records claim.

Biometric and GPS-based attendance: The NMMS system 🔗

One of the most significant (and most contested) recent interventions is the National Mobile Monitoring Service (NMMS) app, introduced in 2021-22. The app requires worksite supervisors (mates) to take real-time attendance of workers along with geotagged photographs, which are uploaded to the central MGNREGA Management Information System.

The underlying logic is simple and powerful. Earlier, attendance was marked on physical muster rolls by supervisors, who could inflate numbers, include “ghost workers,” or under-report actual workers to pocket the difference. A geotagged, timestamped photograph creates an independent digital record that is harder to fake. This directly addresses the very problem MKSS exposed three decades ago in its first Jan Sunwai.

OTP verification and muster roll access 🔗

The NMMS app includes features specifically designed for accountability. It uses OTP-based validation for secure ID creation, allows viewing of downloaded muster rolls within the app, and provides a dedicated option for workers and auditors to view uploaded attendance for the past month. Combined with the e-measurement book (e-MB) system that Rajasthan has begun rolling out to digitally record work measurements every 15 days, the documentary trail becomes much harder to manipulate.

The flip side: Technology can also exclude 🔗

It would be dishonest to present this technology as an unqualified success. A detailed investigation found workers being marked absent by the NMMS app even when their photos were uploaded twice a day, leading to wage cuts. Activists from the NREGA Sangharsh Morcha have pointed out that the pilot in Alwar district of Rajasthan was too small to justify a national rollout, and that many supervisors cannot afford the smartphones the app requires.

The lesson is not that ICT tools should be abandoned, but that they must be designed with marginalised users rather than imposed on them. A geotagged photograph is useless if the woman worker’s face is covered by her ghoonghat or if the network drops in a remote worksite. Accountability systems need offline fallbacks, grievance redress mechanisms, and the continuing oversight of social audits to catch what the software misses.

How the ecosystem empowers marginalised communities 🔗

When the RTI Act, social audits, information kiosks, transparency portals, and digital monitoring systems work together, they create an ecosystem in which marginalised communities can actually enforce their entitlements. The mechanisms reinforce each other in several ways.

Reducing dependence on intermediaries 🔗

Traditionally, a Dalit labourer wanting to check her wage payment had to approach the panchayat secretary, the rozgar sahayak, or a local contractor, each of whom could delay, deny, or demand a bribe. Direct access via a kiosk or portal removes these gatekeepers. The beneficiary becomes the primary reader of her own record.

Converting information into legal claims 🔗

Information by itself does not pay wages. What matters is the ability to convert a discrepancy on paper into a formal complaint, a grievance, or a public hearing. The MKSS tradition of Jan Sunwais, combined with the RTI Act and the statutory social audit provisions of MGNREGA, creates a pathway from “I found a problem” to “the system must respond.” When these avenues fail, civil society coalitions in states like Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh have organised collective social audits involving citizens, NGOs, and civil servants together to surface mass corruption.

Strengthening women’s participation 🔗

MGNREGA has been remarkable for prioritising women: for several years running, women have made up more than half of all participants in the programme. This matters because wage employment in their own name, combined with transparent records they can verify, gives rural women a form of economic citizenship they often lack in other spheres.

The challenges that remain 🔗

Despite these gains, the transparency regime is under real pressure. The RTI Amendment Act of 2019 gave the union government greater control over the tenure and service conditions of Information Commissioners, raising concerns about institutional independence. More recently, Section 44(3) of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 has amended the RTI Act to exempt all “personal information” from disclosure, which critics warn could restrict access to names of scholarship beneficiaries, ration card holders, and even contractors involved in corruption. The very granular, beneficiary-level data that allows marginalised communities to verify their entitlements could become harder to obtain.

At the same time, seven out of 29 Information Commissions in India were defunct for varying periods during 2023-24 due to vacancies, according to the Satark Nagrik Sangathan’s Report Card on Information Commissions. A transparency law without functional appellate bodies loses much of its teeth.

Awareness remains patchy too. Research has repeatedly shown that women in rural areas, Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities, and other disadvantaged groups have significantly lower awareness of RTI rights and appeal mechanisms than urban and upper-caste users. Closing this awareness gap through panchayat-level training, local-language materials, and partnerships between government and civil society is essential if the promise of the RTI is to reach the people who need it most.

What do you think? 🔗

What do you think? If you had to redesign one of these tools, say the NMMS attendance app or the Jan Soochna Portal, to make it genuinely work for a non-literate Adivasi woman in a remote village, what features would you prioritise? And how do we protect the beneficiary-level transparency that marginalised communities depend on from being walled off in the name of data protection?

References

1. https://powerofrti.com/whar-is-rti/
2. https://mkssindia.org/pages/aboutus.html
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_audit
4. https://accountabilityindia.in/sites/default/files/guidelines_-_le.pdf
5. https://www.aidjhu.org/rti_manch
6. https://www.moneylife.in/article/rajasthan-which-pioneered-the-rti-movement-launches-unique-portal-for-suo-moto-disclosures/58229.html
7. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nic.hp.ccmgnrega&hl=en_US
8. https://informatics.nic.in/files/websites/jan-2024/nrega-mobile-monitoring-system.php
9. https://udaipurtimes.com/news/rajasthan-e-mb-for-mgnrega/cid15817658.htm
10. https://slate.com/technology/2023/04/digital-india-mgnrega-protest.html
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi_National_Rural_Employment_Guarantee_Act,_2005
12. https://www.studyiq.com/articles/right-to-information/
13. https://thefederal.com/category/news/rti-dpdp-act-reduces-transparency-anjali-bhardwaj-213312
14. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/governance/20-years-of-rti-act-the-last-11-years-have-seen-a-systematic-undermining-of-the-transparency-regime-in-india
15. https://vajiramandravi.com/current-affairs/right-to-information-act-2005/