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.

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For more information on the different MCF chapters, please click on the links below:

Almora — Bageshwar — Chamoli — Champawat — Nainital — Pauri
Pithoragarh — Rudraprayag — Tehri — Uttarkashi