How can citizens collectively act to claim their right to information? How can access to information increase local accountability? This article, from Third World Quarterly, explores the campaign of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) to secure access to information and fight corruption in Rajastan. It argues that the MKSS experience demonstrates the relevance of the right to information to the concerns of ordinary people in securing their livelihoods. MKSS’s work highlights the potential for collective action and the importance of mobilising popular participation in exposing corruption.
Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) is a grassroots organization based in Rajasthan, formed of local residents as well as committed activists from other parts of India. During the late 1990s, MKSS was able to trace local corruption that was impeding people’s access to essential goods through an innovative approach to gaining access to information (where there was no legal entitlement):
- MKSS developed a unique and collective method for analyzing the official information it was able to obtain from sympathetic bureaucrats or by pressurizing others: this form of social audit was known as jan sunwais-or ‘public hearings’. During these hearings, detailed accounts were read aloud to assembled villagers, exposing the misdeeds of local politicians and sometimes leading to voluntary restitution.
- This approach rested on the principles of collective action and local verification of official accounts. The local focus allowed for the diversion of small funds to be detected which would go unnoticed in larger, formal audits.
- MKSS demonstrated the potential for collective action among groups that tend to shun organized ‘political’ activity. The public hearings fuelled local discontent and a willingness to engage in organised protest to demand that citizens be granted access to more information.
- Subsequently, other organizations in India began to focus on the role of information as a weapon in the battle for accountability.
MKSS worked in a part of India where there were extraordinarily oppressive social relations. It’s most enduring achievement has been to demonstrate to other civil society groups the importance of access to information in their own fields. Other theoretical and practical implications for future work can be drawn from the MKSS experience:
- The international literature on corruption over emphasizes the state as cause and remedy for corruption: it fails to recognize the role of social movements in combating corruption.
- There is an artificial dichotomy between resource rights and the right to information. The MKSS experience demonstrates the right to information is of immediate concern to the poor.
- The active engagement of socially excluded groups is central to both defining the rights agenda, and for participation in the exercise of rights.
- Conventional participatory monitoring and evaluation (PME) techniques do not place enough emphasis on direct confrontation between people’s knowledge and official accounts.
