|
Bringing
the Right to Information to the Grassroots through Children
The
Silicon Valley chapter
of Asha for Education has formed an unprecedented partnership
with the MCF to help young people tap the power of the Right to
Information Act (RTI) to improve their communties.
The
project will involve more than 2,700 children in gathering information
about the current situation in their communities, especially with
regard to their school facilities, and teach them how to use the
RTI to learn about the resources available to their villages. These
children will then be able to teach the rest of the community.
By
learning about government schemes available totheir community and
seeing the gap between the money allocated and the results on the
ground, we believe the children—and through them the community
as a whole—can improve the quality of education, water and
sanitation and a host of other problems that plague rural areas.
Background
on the RTI:
India’s
2005 RTI Act is one of the most ambitious and proactive sunshine
laws in the world. It provides Indian citizens with unprecedented
power to ask questions of their government at every level. It also
holds the potential—by improving accountability for delivery
of services—to make visible, possibly immediate, changes in
the quality of life for many marginalized communities.
But
few people in the villages of Uttarakhand know about the RTI or
how to use it. The state government's Public Information Office
shows that more than 90 percent of all RTI applications filed were
from Urban areas.
At
a time of extraordinary growth and prosperity in India, many communities
and innumerable children are being left further and further behind.
There are myriad government schemes and programs designed to uplift
India’s poor, but too often they simply don’t make it
to the target population, their resources lost to corruption and
inefficiency.
The
RTI has the potential to change this by helping people understand
the opportunities and resources available to them so they can hold
government officials accountable for providing those resources.
But no sooner was the RTI act passed than efforts were underway
to amend and weaken it. There is a powerful motivation among those
who would like to see the RTI rendered ineffective. Unless the common
people of India find an equally strong motivation to stand up and
fight to preserve it, its ability to withstand this onslaught is
in doubt.
We
believe the surest way to strengthen and preserve the RTI is to
spread it broadly and deeply into the villages, to make it such
an intrinsic part of local communities that the people will staunchly
resist any effort to destroy it. It is also necessary to do this
without creating needless animosity between the people and government
officials; instead encouraging people to use the RTI for the benefit
of all. But as yet, many people in rural India barely know what
the RTI is. Few have used it or would even know how to go about
filing an RTI application.
This
is where the children come in. It is a widely accepted fact that
young people are usually the earliest adapters. The Mountain Children’s
Forum (MCF) has also found that children are a powerful force for
spreading information and awareness into local communities. With
the support of our partner organizations, the young people can be
empowered to teach the people in their villages about RTI and how
to use it to improve their communities and discourage waste and
corruption, and do so in a way that furthers interaction and cooperation
between the community and the government.
We
will be posting additional information and resources about this
project soon and as it gets underway.
back
to top
For
more information on the different MCF chapters, please click on
the links below:
Almora
Bageshwar
Chamoli
Champawat
Nainital
Pauri
Pithoragarh
Rudraprayag
Tehri
Uttarkashi
|