The Movement for Transparency Leading to RTI Law in India

Long before the Right to Information Act became law in 2005, a quiet revolution was brewing in the dusty villages of Rajasthan. Peasants, labourers, social activists, and a handful of concerned citizens began asking a simple but radical question: if this is a democracy, why can’t we see the records of how our money is being spent? That question, repeated with growing urgency across a decade and a half, eventually forced the government to recognise transparency as a legal right. The story of the RTI Act is less about legislation and more about an unusual partnership between rural India, civil society, and the courts.

The culture of secrecy before RTI 🔗

For decades after independence, the administration functioned under the long shadow of the Official Secrets Act, 1923, a colonial law designed to keep information tightly locked inside government files. Citizens had no legal mechanism to ask what was being done in their name, how public funds were spent, or why certain decisions were taken. This secrecy was not just a bureaucratic habit; it was an inherited mindset that treated the state as a ruler rather than a servant of the people.

By the 1970s, the gap between a democratic promise and an opaque state had grown too wide to ignore. A series of developments, some legal, some social, would slowly chip away at this wall of silence.

Judicial recognition of the right to know 🔗

The courts played an unexpectedly pioneering role in building the case for transparency. Even before any statute on information existed, the Supreme Court began treating the right to know as a natural extension of the freedom of speech and expression guaranteed under Article 19(1)(a).

State of U.P. v. Raj Narain (1975) 🔗

The most cited milestone is the 1975 judgment in State of U.P. v. Raj Narain. The case arose from an election petition where Raj Narain sought disclosure of the “Blue Book,” a document containing security arrangements for the Prime Minister’s travel. The government invoked privilege under Section 123 of the Indian Evidence Act, but the court refused to accept a blanket claim of secrecy. Justice K.K. Mathew’s concurring opinion went further and held that in a responsible government, citizens have a right to know every public act done by their public functionaries.

This was a philosophical turning point. The court had effectively declared that democracy and secrecy could not comfortably coexist.

Building on the precedent 🔗

The principle laid down in Raj Narain was reinforced in subsequent cases. In S.P. Gupta v. Union of India (1982), the judges reiterated that access to information was essential to make accountability meaningful. Later, in the PUCL v. Union of India ruling, the court extended this logic to elections, holding that voters have a right to know the assets, educational background, and criminal antecedents of candidates standing for public office. Together, these judgments established that the right to information was an implied fundamental right flowing from Article 19(1)(a), even if no specific law had yet been enacted.

Legal recognition on paper, however, was not enough. Converting that abstract right into a lived reality required a different kind of energy, one that would come not from courtrooms but from the fields of rural Rajasthan.

The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan: a grassroots spark 🔗

In a small village called Devdungri in Rajsamand district, three activists, Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey, and Shankar Singh, began organising rural labourers and farmers in the late 1980s. Aruna Roy had resigned from the Indian Administrative Service in 1975 to work with the rural poor, and together with her colleagues she helped formally establish the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) on 1 May 1990, at a public gathering of around a thousand people near Bhim. The organisation deliberately chose to function as a non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic collective that refused government funds.

MKSS initially took up what seemed like a basic economic demand: payment of legally mandated minimum wages to labourers working on drought relief schemes. As the activists dug deeper, they discovered that official muster rolls were being falsified. Wages were being shown as paid to workers who did not exist, or to workers who had actually received far less. The fight for wages quickly evolved into a fight for access to the records that documented those wages.

Hamara paisa, hamara hisaab 🔗

The slogan that came to define the movement was disarmingly simple: “Hamara paisa, hamara hisaab” – our money, our accounts. One of the early MKSS leaders, Sushila, captured the moral force behind it when she argued that if an ordinary mother asks her son for an accounting of ten rupees, surely citizens could ask the government for an accounting of the billions being spent in their name. The campaign’s other slogan, “The Right to Know, the Right to Live,” connected information directly to survival.

Jan Sunwais: public hearings as a tool 🔗

The real innovation of MKSS was the Jan Sunwai, or public hearing. Starting in 1994, activists would obtain official expenditure records, often unofficially, and read them aloud in village gatherings. Residents would then verify whether the work listed had actually been done, whether the workers named had actually been paid, and whether the materials claimed had actually been delivered.

The results were explosive. Public hearings exposed inflated bills, ghost workers, and fabricated projects. In some instances, officials were caught using camel dung to forge thumbprints of non-existent wageworkers. In other cases, elected representatives publicly returned money they had pocketed. Most importantly, ordinary villagers discovered that they could question, challenge, and hold officials accountable in front of their own neighbours.

The Beawar dharna of 1996 🔗

The Rajasthan government initially responded with promises. On 5 April 1995, Chief Minister Bhairon Singh Shekhawat assured the state assembly that citizens would be given access to development records. Nothing happened. Frustrated by official inaction, MKSS launched a historic sit-in at Chang Gate in Beawar on 6 April 1996. What began as a modest protest stretched into a forty-day dharna, with rural women forming the largest contingent of demonstrators.

The protest was unusual because the demand was not for food, jobs, or water, the typical rural grievances, but for information. Protestors travelled from across Rajasthan, and the sustained agitation drew national attention. It also catalysed the formation of a broader coalition that could take the demand to the national level.

The National Campaign for People’s Right to Information 🔗

As the demand grew beyond Rajasthan, activists realised that a coordinating body was needed to drive the movement at the national level. The National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI) was established in 1996 to advocate for a legally enforceable right to information. Its founding members were a diverse mix of activists, journalists, lawyers, retired civil servants, and academics.

NCPRI played three critical roles during the long decade that followed. First, it drafted model legislation that could serve as the basis for a national law. Second, it lobbied parliamentarians, engaged with the media, and built cross-party pressure for reform. Third, it translated the ground-level insights of MKSS and other grassroots groups into the technical and legal language needed for legislation.

State-level victories 🔗

Long before the national law, several states began passing their own RTI statutes. According to documentation from MKSS, RTI laws were enacted in Tamil Nadu (1997), Goa (1997), Madhya Pradesh (1998), Rajasthan (2000), Maharashtra (2000), Karnataka (2000), Delhi (2001), and later Assam and Jammu and Kashmir. These state laws demonstrated that transparency legislation was not only feasible but also politically viable.

The voices that propelled the movement 🔗

While thousands of activists, villagers, and volunteers contributed to the cause, a few individuals became particularly visible as the public face of the movement.

Aruna Roy 🔗

Aruna Roy, a former IAS officer and co-founder of MKSS, was perhaps the most recognisable figure in the movement. Her ability to bridge the world of the bureaucracy with the world of rural activism gave the campaign both credibility and reach. She later served on the National Advisory Council where she helped shape the final contours of the RTI Act.

Anna Hazare 🔗

In Maharashtra, the veteran social activist Anna Hazare took up the transparency cause through a series of fasts and public campaigns. Starting in 1997, he pressed the state government to enact an RTI law, and when authorities dragged their feet, he resorted to a “fast unto death” in July 2003 that ended twelve days later with the enactment of the legislation. The Maharashtra law later served as one of the templates for the national RTI Act.

Harsh Mander 🔗

Harsh Mander, a former IAS officer who resigned from service after the 2002 Gujarat violence, brought his administrative experience to the movement. He was closely associated with the National Campaign for the People’s Right to Information and later served on the National Advisory Council, where he worked on issues connecting transparency with food security and social protection.

From the Freedom of Information Act to RTI 🔗

The central government’s first legislative response to the growing demand was the Freedom of Information Act, 2002. While the law acknowledged the principle of access, activists saw it as inadequate. It was never notified, had wide exemptions, offered appeals only within the government itself, and did not treat access to information as an enforceable right.

The real breakthrough came when the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government came to power in 2004 with a Common Minimum Programme that explicitly promised a more progressive and meaningful right to information law. The National Advisory Council, which included Aruna Roy and Harsh Mander among others, drew on NCPRI’s draft to recommend a far stronger bill.

The resulting Right to Information Bill was tabled in Parliament in December 2004, scrutinised by a Parliamentary Standing Committee, and, after significant strengthening to include state governments and impose meaningful penalties, was passed by both Houses in May 2005. It received Presidential assent on 15 June 2005 and came into force on 12 October 2005.

Why the movement mattered 🔗

The RTI Act was not handed down as a gift from the state. It was extracted through a sustained struggle that combined grassroots mobilisation, judicial activism, and sophisticated policy advocacy. The movement changed the grammar of Indian democracy in several ways. It demonstrated that the rural poor could articulate and win legal rights. It institutionalised social audit as a tool of governance, later borrowed by schemes such as MGNREGA. And it inspired similar campaigns across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Equally important, it shifted the cultural expectation that citizens have of their government. After 2005, the question was no longer whether citizens could ask but whether officials could refuse. Estimates suggest that between 40 and 60 lakh RTI applications are filed every year, a scale that few had imagined when those first Jan Sunwais were held under Rajasthan’s harsh sun.

What do you think? Could a law as transformative as the RTI have emerged without the decade-long groundwork laid by rural movements like MKSS? And in an age of digital governance, does the spirit of the original transparency movement need to be reinvented for today’s challenges?

References

1. https://lawbhoomi.com/overview-of-right-to-information-act-2005/
2. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/438670/
3. https://whistleblowersblog.org/global-whistleblowers/the-accidental-revolution-46-years-of-right-to-know-in-india/
4. https://www.rgics.org/democracy/the-right-to-information-act-2005/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aruna_Roy
6. https://www.theweek.in/theweek/cover/2025/10/04/rti-movement-india-history-beawar-devdungari-village.html
7. https://justassociates.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/mkss_case_study_section_ii.pdf
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazdoor_Kisan_Shakti_Sangathan
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Campaign_for_People%27s_Right_to_Information
10. https://mkssindia.org/struggle-for-peoples-right-to-information/
11. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anna-Hazare
12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harsh_Mander
13. https://thelaw.institute/business-law-as-applicable-to-co-operative-i/right-to-information-act-genesis-2005/