Mainstream WeeklyBOOK EXCERPT
An excerpt from Chapter 5 of The Measurement Trap: India’s Quest for Social Progress Through Eight Decades (Routledge, forthcoming). Endnotes have been omitted; full references appear in the book.
ON 6 APRIL 1996, in the market town of Beawar in Ajmer district, a few hundred labourers, farmers and their organisers sat down at Chang Gate and stayed for forty days. The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, the organisation of workers and peasants that had by then held a series of public hearings, had reduced its politics to a single demand of startling modesty: that ordinary people be entitled to obtain copies of the documents recording public works in their villages, the muster rolls, the bills, the vouchers, the sanctions.
The slogan under which they sat translated the demand into four words that carry this book’s whole subject, hamara paisa, hamara hisaab, our money, our accounts. The dharna drew crowds, donations of grain and cash from Beawar’s traders, and the attention of the national press; the editor Prabhash Joshi came from Delhi, and the editorial he wrote in Jansatta gave the movement its second slogan, hum jaanenge, hum jiyenge, we will know, we will live.
What was being asked for at Chang Gate was the state’s own numbers, and the theory behind it was Dadabhai Naoroji’s theory of 1901, carried to the village: the ruler’s records, once in the subject’s hands, can be turned against the ruler. What the Beawar sitters added was an instrument the drain theorists never had. They did not propose to analyse the accounts in a study; they proposed to read them aloud in the village before the people whose names the accounts bore, and to let the crowd say whether the paper spoke true.
Most of India’s official statistics were built for planners or for markets. The decade from roughly 1994 to 2013 is the one in which the poorest Indians built a dashboard of their own, and then forced the state, by statute, to keep it supplied.
The method had been assembled over the preceding decade in a mud-floored house in Devdungri, a village in Rajsamand district where three organisers had settled in 1987: Aruna Roy, who had resigned from the Indian Administrative Service in 1975 to work outside it; Nikhil Dey, who had left an American university to join her; and Shankar Singh, a communicator of genius from a nearby village. The organisation they founded on May Day 1990, the MKSS, began with the oldest questions of agrarian politics, land and the statutory minimum wage on famine relief works, and it was the wage question that led to the records.
Labourers on drought works were being paid less than the minimum, and when they pressed, officials replied that the measurement books showed they had not completed the task. The workers’ word stood against the state’s record, and the record won, every time, because only one side of the argument was allowed to see it. The road to the archive, the MKSS discovered, ran through the wage packet.
The instrument they built to force the record open was the jan sunwai, the public hearing, and the first was held at Kot Kirana in Pali district in December 1994, with four more across the region in the following months. The form was simple and has not changed much since. Copies of the muster rolls and bills for local works, extracted from sympathetic officials or prised loose by pressure, were read aloud before the assembled village, with officials and elected representatives invited to sit on the dais and respond; and the crowd supplied the audit.
A dead man appeared on a muster roll, and his widow stood up to say so. A school listed as built stood before the meeting as four incomplete walls. Labourers heard themselves marked present and paid on days they had been elsewhere, and said so, in public, on the record. The findings, village by village, were of works billed and never built, of wages recorded and never paid, of the same stretch of road constructed several times on paper; and the sums involved, modest in Delhi’s terms, were the development budget of people with low incomes.
Rob Jenkins and Anne Marie Goetz, the first scholars to study the hearings closely, saw precisely what had been invented: an accountability mechanism in which the state’s own documents were cross-examined by the only witnesses competent to contradict them, the people named in their columns.
Their account preserves the hearings’ texture: officials confronted at the dais who returned money on the spot rather than face the crowd’s arithmetic, junior engineers who conceded that works existed only in the measurement books, and sarpanches who disclosed the immunity of the file being read aloud. The restitutions were small and the prosecutions smaller, and the method’s power lay elsewhere, in the demonstration, repeated village by village, that the state’s records were checkable at all. A muster roll had been a verdict; the hearings made it a claim, and a claim can be tested.
The State’s response taught the movement its next lesson. On 5 April 1995 the Chief Minister of Rajasthan announced in the Assembly that the people would be given the right to obtain copies of documents relating to local development works; the announcement was applauded and then not implemented, and the gap between the promise and the practice is what put the MKSS on the pavement at Beawar a year later.
The Beawar dharna of 1996 was followed by a fifty-three-day sit-in at Jaipur in 1997, accompanied by Shankar Singh’s Ghotala Rath Yatra, a travelling chariot of scams that carried the hearings’ findings through the towns as street theatre. The theatricality was method rather than decoration. A population that could not read the records could hear them sung, and the songs and puppets that Rajasthan’s campaign became famous for were instruments of numeracy as much as of protest, translating the columns of the account into a form its victims could interrogate.
Every technique this book has described for making numbers travel, from Nightingale’s wedge diagrams to the Human Development Index, has its counterpart in the yatra’s repertoire, worked out for an audience the older techniques had never imagined. Rajasthan legislated at the decade’s end, and its Right to Information Act of 2000 joined a small procession of State laws, Tamil Nadu and Goa having moved first, that had begun to concede in the States what Delhi still withheld.
The national campaign ran on two tracks, the movement’s and the establishment’s, and the tracks converged slowly. The National Campaign for People’s Right to Information was founded in 1996, joining the MKSS veterans to Delhi’s lawyers, editors and retired judges, and draft bills began to circulate, one prepared under the Press Council’s auspices the same year.
The establishment’s track produced, first, a cautionary specimen: the Freedom of Information Act, passed by Parliament in 2002 and assented to on 6 January 2003, contained a commencement clause requiring a government notification to bring it into force, and the notification was never issued. An Act of Parliament, complete in every formality, sat on the statute book for two-and-a-half years without a single citizen being able to use it, a law in the condition of a report withheld.
The politics changed in the summer of 2004, when a new government took office, owing debts to the idea of rights, and, on 4 June 2004, constituted a National Advisory Council under Sonia Gandhi to carry its promises into the drafting stage. Aruna Roy sat on the council; so, in time, did the economist Jean Drèze; and the council became the channel through which the movement’s texts reached the cabinet.
The Right to Information Act that emerged passed the Lok Sabha on 11 May 2005 and the Rajya Sabha the following day, received the President’s assent on 15 June, and came fully into force on 12 October 2005. Its design carried the hearings’ lessons in statutory language.
Information was defined to include records, documents, samples and material held in any form; a Public Information Officer in every office was bound to answer within thirty days on pain of personal penalty; and section 4 obliged every public authority to publish, without being asked, seventeen categories of information about itself, its functions, its finances, its decisions, the movement’s old demand that disclosure be the default converted into a standing duty.
The Act also built the machinery of its own enforcement: Information Commissions at the centre and in every State, with the power to compel disclosure and to fine the delaying officer out of his own salary, two hundred and fifty rupees a day to a ceiling of twenty-five thousand. The penalty clause was the drafters’ answer to the fate of every earlier promise of openness, the Rajasthan assurance of 1995 included: a duty without a consequence had proved to be a press release, and the new law priced the officer’s silence.
The Act’s first serious test came within a year of commencement, when the government moved in 2006 to amend it to exclude file notings, the marginal annotations in which Indian decisions are actually reasoned, from the definition of information. The campaign that had won the law defended it in the same public style, the amendment was shelved, and the notings stayed open, a victory the movement has had to re-win in one form or another in most years since.
The re-winning had machinery of its own. Satark Nagrik Sangathan, set up in Delhi in 2003 by Anjali Bhardwaj with others who had come out of the anti-corruption work of the preceding years, carried the Beawar practice into the capital’s slum settlements, reading ration, pension and works records back to the households named in them, and published performance cards for sitting legislators in the Delhi and Bihar dailies. Then it turned the instrument on the machinery of disclosure itself. With the Centre for Equity Studies it began, in 2018, an annual report card on the information commissions, counting vacant posts, pending appeals and disposal rates in the very bodies the Act had created to enforce it.
The counting became a case. On 25 April 2018, Bhardwaj, Amrita Johri and Commodore Lokesh Batra, retired, moved the Supreme Court under Article 32 on the strength of that report, arguing through Prashant Bhushan that a commission left without commissioners defeats a right of access as completely as a repeal would. On 15 February 2019 a bench of Justices A.K. Sikri and S. Abdul Nazeer accepted that more commissioners were needed and directed the centre and the States to fill the vacancies within fixed periods, to advertise the posts and the criteria on which they would be filled, and to place on their websites the particulars of the applicants and the composition of the selection committees. The remedy, characteristically, was disclosure about the disclosure machinery. The Court kept the matter on its list, and was still calling for compliance reports from the centre and the States in 2025.
The Act was used on a scale its drafters had hoped for, and its opponents had feared. The careful national assessments of its first decade estimated four to six million applications filed every year, and found the great majority to be what the movement had always said the law was for, individuals pursuing their own entitlements, the ration card, the pension, the answer sheet, the mutation entry, with the journalist’s exposé the celebrated exception rather than the rule.
The Indian law was, within a few years of its passage, among the most heavily used access statutes anywhere. The state’s own reformers embraced it in principle: the Second Administrative Reforms Commission made the Act the subject of its first report, presented in June 2006 under the title Right to Information: Master Key to Good Governance, and recommended, among much else, the repeal of the Official Secrets Act of 1923, the colonial statute whose presumption of closure the new law had inverted.
The presumption was the reform. For a century and a half the Indian state’s records had been closed unless opened; after October 2005 they were open unless closed, and everything that followed took place in the changed light.