The Growth of MKSS: Innovations and Public Hearings

In the dusty villages of central Rajasthan during the early 1990s, a quiet revolution was taking shape. Farmers, daily-wage laborers, and rural women began doing something unthinkable in Indian governance: they were reading government records aloud and demanding to know where their money had gone. This grassroots experiment, led by the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), eventually grew into one of the most consequential civil society movements in post-independence history – one that would give the country its landmark Right to Information (RTI) Act.

From a wage struggle to a transparency movement 🔗

The MKSS was founded on May 1, 1990, in Devdungri village, Rajasthan, by Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey, Shankar Singh, and local associates to organize rural workers and peasants around minimum wages and employment guarantees. The organization’s earliest work was deceptively simple: it tried to ensure that workers on famine relief and panchayat development projects actually received the wages promised to them under law.

Very quickly, however, MKSS activists ran into a wall that was less about money and more about secrecy. To prove that wages were being stolen, they needed to see muster rolls, bills, and vouchers – documents that were treated as government secrets. Members realized that to enforce their economic rights and exercise democratic controls, they needed the right to access the documents, which constituted the basis for granting or denying them their rights. The wage struggle, in other words, quickly revealed itself to be a struggle over information.

Parsa and the first demand for records 🔗

One turning point came through a poor peasant named Parsa from Kot Kirana village. Parsa approached the MKSS in 1993 because he could not understand why he had not been paid minimum wages for some panchayat work, and his demand to see the records led the MKSS to persist and access records from the Block Office in Raipur, Pali District. That one complaint would eventually open the door to a fundamentally new way of doing accountability in India.

The invention of the Jansunwai 🔗

The MKSS’s signature innovation was the Jansunwai, or public hearing. Rather than filing court cases, submitting petitions, or lobbying politicians, MKSS activists brought government records directly into the village square. Detailed documents derived from official expenditure records were read aloud to the people of the villages who gathered, and while the hearings were organised independent of the government, government officials were invited to attend.

The process was straightforward but powerful. Activists would quietly obtain photocopies of muster rolls, vouchers, and bills – often with help from sympathetic junior officials. Villagers would then cross-check these entries against their own memories and experiences. The hearing itself became a kind of collective audit, where anyone whose name appeared on a payment list could stand up and confirm or contest what was written.

The Kot Kirana hearing of December 1994 🔗

The very first Jansunwai was held on December 2, 1994, in Kot Kirana village in Pali district, Rajasthan, and it exposed corruption in development projects in a way that strengthened the demand for the right to know. The hearing was revelatory. People shown in records as employed in the construction of anicuts were not even living in the area at the time. Official records showed that villagers involved in the construction of minor irrigation works had received their wages, but in reality, they never did.

Similar patterns followed at other early hearings. Canals appeared on paper but not on the ground. Wells were listed as 270 meters deep when the actual hole was only 90 meters. A veterinary hospital was entered in the records as built, even though nothing existed until officials hastily threw up a makeshift structure on the second floor of a village administrative building before the hearing – forgetting that cattle could not climb stairs.

The Jawaja hearing and mounting resistance 🔗

After Kot Kirana, MKSS went on to hold a series of hearings in rapid succession. These were the Public Hearings in Kotkirana on December 2, 1994, Bhim on December 7, 1994, Vijaypura on December 17, 1994, Jawaja on January 7, 1995, and Thana on April 25, 1995. Each built on the last, pulling in larger crowds and drawing testimony not only from local villagers but from people who had traveled long distances just to witness these remarkable proceedings.

The Jawaja hearing in Ajmer district was particularly significant because it showed how quickly officialdom had begun to push back. As public hearings went from success to success, resistance grew to the availability of any official records, and no official records could be obtained for the next public hearing at Jawaja. In other cases, however, the moral force of the hearings was so strong that accused sarpanches agreed, on the spot, to return more than one lakh rupees each of misappropriated funds.

Social audit as a political tool 🔗

What separated MKSS’s hearings from ordinary anti-corruption rallies was the methodology. Each Jansunwai rested on a structured three-step process: obtain the documents, verify them against ground realities with affected villagers, and then confront officials in a public forum. This approach of comparing paper records with people’s lived experience became the template for what would later be formalized as the social audit across India.

The numbers that emerged were staggering. The first jan sunwai in Vijaypura scrutinized famine relief works and revealed over 40% discrepancies in reported versus actual labor payments, while a subsequent hearing in Jawaja audited irrigation projects, leading to admissions of corruption by officials and voluntary repayments exceeding ₹50,000. In Janawad panchayat of Rajsamand district, later inquiries showed that of a total allocation of ₹123 lakhs over six years, roughly ₹67 lakhs had been lost to corruption, with 49 of 141 examined development works turning out not to exist at all.

The Beawar dharna of April 1996 🔗

Despite the success of the hearings, one problem kept resurfacing: without a legal right, activists could never guarantee access to records. Sympathetic officials could leak documents one day and be transferred the next. In April 1995, the then Chief Minister of Rajasthan, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, made an announcement on the floor of the state assembly promising the right to inspect panchayat records. The promise was then effectively shelved.

That betrayal set the stage for the most famous chapter in the MKSS story. On April 6, 1996, the MKSS announced a strike in the city of Beawar in Ajmer, Rajasthan, and after a series of public hearings had exposed systemic corruption across Rajasthan and the reneging of the promise of the Right to Information given by the then Chief Minister, the organisation began a historic forty-day-long dharna to demand the Right to Information.

A strange and extraordinary protest 🔗

What unfolded at Chang Gate in Beawar was unlike any protest the country had seen. Instead of asking for the customary roti, kapda or makan – food, clothing or shelter – what the visitors wanted was, of all things, a right to information, and they handed the sub-divisional officer a memorandum asserting the people’s right to information with the specific demand for the right to obtain certified copies of details of development expenditure.

The dharna sustained itself for forty days through a remarkable mix of grassroots creativity: puppet shows, Dalit folk singers, and bhajans rewritten with corruption-themed lyrics. Support came from surprising quarters. Vegetable sellers donated potatoes and tomatoes; daily-wage laborers dropped coins into the collection basket; a child worker reportedly visited the protest every day. Senior journalists – including Nikhil Chakravartty, Kuldip Nayar, and Prabhash Joshi – traveled to Beawar to report on the struggle. Joshi’s editorial in Jansatta, titled “Hum Jaanenge, Hum Jiyenge” (“We will know, we will live”), gave the RTI movement its defining slogan.

The state’s response 🔗

Under mounting pressure, the Rajasthan government finally moved. After 40 days of the MKSS’s dharna, the Rajasthan government at last bowed to mounting public pressure and constituted a five-member committee headed by the additional chief secretary Arun Kumar, to look into the implications of the MKSS’s demands and submit its report within two months. An initial order on April 6, 1996 – the same day the dharna began – granted villagers the right to inspect, but not photocopy, development-related documents, which MKSS considered inadequate. The struggle therefore continued, shifting first to Ajmer and then to Jaipur.

From Beawar to a national law 🔗

The Beawar dharna did not immediately produce a full Right to Information Act, but it permanently shifted the political conversation. The platform of village-based public hearings or “Jan Sunwais” pioneered by the MKSS in the mid-1990s became institutionalized in processes of the government and is also used as a means of public audit across the country.

Rajasthan passed its own Right to Information Act in 2000, becoming one of the early states to do so alongside Tamil Nadu, Goa, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Delhi. The National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI), formed in 1996, took the Rajasthan model to the national stage and drafted the first version of what eventually became the landmark national legislation. The Right to Information Act, 2005 drew directly on the methods, language, and political energy first forged in villages like Kot Kirana and Jawaja.

Why the MKSS model endures 🔗

Looking back, the growth of MKSS offers a few enduring lessons about how public policy actually changes in India. First, innovation in governance often comes from outside the formal institutions of the state. Second, abstract rights like transparency become concrete only when tied to tangible grievances like unpaid wages or fake muster rolls. Third, accountability is strongest when it is public, collective, and faces officials directly rather than through paperwork alone.

The Jansunwai tradition has since evolved into statutory social audits under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), and similar participatory audit methods are being experimented with for public distribution, pensions, and even urban services. In all of these, one can see a direct line back to a small group of activists sitting under a tree in Rajasthan, reading out government records to a crowd that had finally found its voice.

What do you think? If the Jansunwai model of reading records aloud and confronting officials in public was so effective in rural Rajasthan of the 1990s, could a similar model work today for urban issues like municipal budgets, public contracts, or the functioning of digital welfare systems? And does direct, face-to-face accountability have anything left to offer in an age where most government data is supposed to live on dashboards and portals?

References

1. https://grokipedia.com/page/Mazdoor_Kisan_Shakti_Sangathan
2. https://mkssindia.org/struggle-for-peoples-right-to-information/
3. https://broadband.forum/threads/right-to-information-rti-act.102578/
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazdoor_Kisan_Shakti_Sangathan
5. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/governance/20-years-of-rti-act-the-slow-unravelling-of-indias-transparency-law
6. https://countercurrents.org/2024/09/beawar-democracy-celebration-to-recall-how-struggles-of-the-poor-led-to-the-movement-for-the-right-to-information/
7. https://gfm.akshayakalpa.org/read/feature-article/rti-act-a-powerful-tool-in-fighting-hunger
8. http://www.newtactics.org/wp-content/uploads/Right-Know-EN.pdf
9. http://www.freedominfo.org/documents/rtiessay.pdf
10. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/might-of-the-right-26114
11. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/80616728/
12. https://rti.gov.in/