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RTI Success Story

                     Khal Baal Panchayat
               District: Tehri

                     Supported by : Asha

RTI really works

Pranaam to our PABAM companions:

Mount Valley Development Association held a workshop on the " Right To Information Act" (RTI) in our village with the support of the Mountain Children’s Foundation. As part of this workshop, some members of our bal panchayat filed RTI inquiries with the relevant government organizations to address problems in our village. We also helped adults in the village, who could not read or write, file applications of their own. Here are two cases in which the RTI helped us find the truth and help members of our community.

Case Study I:
In our village, Ms. Sulochana Devi, wife of the late Buddhi Lal, is a widow living in poverty. We wanted to find out if she was entitled to a widow’s pension. Some people of the village had taken money from her and promised that they would file the papers for her widow’s pension, but none of these people actually sent her papers to the Social Welfare Department. We got to know this when we filed an RTI request asking “Why is Sulochana Devi not getting her widow’s pension?”

In just a few days, we received a written response saying that her papers had not reached the Social Welfare department. They also said that if we sent the papers to the office, they would release her pension as soon as possible. In addition, they gave us a list of the people in our village who are currently receiving a pension from the department.

We immediately sent her papers to the department and they have accepted her application.

Thanks to the Right to Information Act, we were able to learn the truth and found a solution to our problem.

Case Study II:
Mr. Sohan Lal also lives in our village. After his wife’s death, all the responsibility of caring for their two children has fallen on him. He has no cultivatable land and has been working as a day laborer to make ends meet. In December of 2008, he received an electricity bill of Rs. 5000/-. He has a BPL (Below Poverty Line) meter and appealed to the electricity board that he had not used so much electricity. But the workers at the electricity board refused to listen to him and threatened to cut off his electricity and take other punitive actions against him. Because of his current financial situation, Rs. 5000/- is an unmanageable amount of money and as a result he was extremely worried.

The members of our bal panchayat inspired Mr. Sohan Lal to file an RTI request. We helped him write the application as we had learned in our RTI workshop. In his application, Mr. Sohan Lal asked the electricity department why his bill was so outrageously high. Within a month, a Junior Engineer came from the electricity department and, along with some other people of the village, went to Mr. Sohan Lal’s house to check his meter. The meter was found to be faulty and the Rs. 5000/- charge was subsequently waived. Mr. Sohan Lal thanked our entire bal panchayat for helping him.

In this way, by getting training on the RTI Act, we were able to solve several problems in our village. We all thank the Mountain Children’s Foundation for their support.

With thanks,

The Members of Bal Panchayat Khal,
District Tehri,
Gharwal,
Uttrakhand

The Mountain Children's Foundation,63-A Vyom Prasth, G.M.S Road,Dehradun, Uttarakhand 248001, India
Phone: 91-135-6532937 Email: mcfglobal @ mymountains.org