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Arjun Sheoran

For MKSS

FOR Third World Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 3
(1999), pp. 603-22

Accounts and Accountability

Theoretical Implications of the
Right-to-Information Movement in India

Rob Jenkins and Anne Marie Goetz

The work of a small and unusual activist group in
the north Indian state of Rajasthan has raised a series of practical and
theoretical issues concerning the best means for combating specific instances
of corruption, and for promoting accountability more generally. The Mazdoor
Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), or Association for the Empowerment of Workers
and Farmers, has waged a campaign to secure the right of ordinary people to
gain access to information held by government officials. In the process of
experimenting with methods for compiling, sharing and verifying expenditure
data at very local levels – thus far, in the absence of a statutory entitlement
to such information – the MKSS has developed a radical interpretation of the
notion that citizens have a right both to know how they are governed and to
participate actively in the process of auditing their representatives. This
article examines the process by which this campaign emerged and the means by
which it pursues its goals. It then analyses the implications of the MKSS
experience, and the larger movement it has spawned, for contemporary debates in
three areas: human rights, participatory development and, of course,
anti-corruption.

The MKSS and the Right to Information

The MKSS is a grassroots organisation based in
Rajasthan’s centrally located Rajsamand district. It has described itself as a
"non-party political formation". It relies for support less on its
relatively small formal membership than on its much larger informal following.
The driving force behind the MKSS is a combination of local residents and a
handful of committed activists from other parts of India who, since the late
1980s, have made the area their home. Over the past four years, the core group
has been joined by others from outside the area on a rotating basis. The MKSS
distinguishes itself from conventional non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
Instead of channelling external funds or focusing on service-delivery, the MKSS
addresses issues of concern to the poorer sections of local society.

The MKSS’s interest in the right to information
arose from its work in the late 1980s and early 1990s on livelihood issues,
such as the failure of the state government to enforce minimum-wage regulations
on drought-relief works, to ensure availability of subsidised food and other
essential commodities through the Public Distribution System (PDS), or to
prevent the illegal occupation of government land by powerful local interests.
Though the MKSS is also active on a number of other fronts – for instance,
protesting atrocities against lower castes, religious minorities and women – it
is particularly the efforts around wages and prices which generated a belief
that access to official documents was an essential part of the struggle to
demand accountability from local authorities. Its work on minimum wages, for
instance, highlighted the role of corruption in the underpayment of wages, as
it became clear that local authorities were billing the central and state
governments for the full amount. This led to greater awareness of other
malpractices which local workers had observed first-hand, but had no method of
documenting. These included inflated estimates for public-works projects, the
use of poor-quality materials, and over-billing by suppliers. To combat these
forms of fraud, it became clear that access was required not only to balance
sheets, but also to supporting documentation which could be cross-checked by
workers organised through the MKSS – for instance, employment registers and
bills submitted for the purchase of materials.

As for the Public Distribution System (PDS), the
main problem was the diversion of foodgrains and other commodities by
"ration shop" owners to the open market, where they fetch much higher
prices. This severely depleted the stocks available for poorer people, who
should have been able to purchase food and other essentials (like kerosene) at
government-determined subsidised prices through the ration shops. The MKSS came
to the conclusion that such malfeasance could not be traced without access to
official documentation indicating how much of each subsidised commodity had
been delivered by the government’s civil supplies department to each licensed
ration shop, and access to the shop-level sale registers which furnish the
names and ration-card numbers of those who purportedly purchased these goods at
the official, subsidised price. In theory, the amount delivered to the shop by
the government should match the amount sold to ration-card holders. In practice,
bogus names (or inflated quantities for genuine names) are listed in sale
registers to make up for the amounts illegally diverted by shop-owners to the
open market.

While the nexus between local politicians, local
officials, and local contractors was well known, it continued to thrive under a
veil of secrecy. Hence the focus on information, which provided a rallying
point for resistance among poorer groups and the basis for a larger campaign
addressed at the state government, which is responsible for framing rules to
govern the procedures of local authorities.

One of the MKSS’s most important innovations has
been the development of a collective method for analysing the official
information it has been able to obtain by persuading sympathetic bureaucrats,
or by putting pressure on those who were less forthcoming. In a series of jan
sunwais – or "public hearings" – detailed accounts, derived from
official expenditure records and other supporting documentation, are read aloud
to assembled villagers. These meetings are organised independently, not through
the official, statutorily recognised village assemblies (or gram sabhas), but
elected representatives and local government officials are also invited to
attend. These orderly hearings are presided over by a panel of respected
individuals from within and outside the area. Local people are invited to give
testimony which highlights discrepancies between the official record and their
own experiences as labourers on public-works projects, applicants for means-tested
anti-poverty schemes, or consumers in ration shops. Through this direct form of
"social audit", many people discovered that they had been listed as
beneficiaries of anti-poverty schemes, though they had never received payment.
Others were astonished to learn of large payments to local building contractors
for works that were never performed. This approach depends upon a principle of
collective and very local verification of official accounts, as it is only at
the local level that the many small diversions of funds, which go unnoticed in
massive formal audits, can be detected. These jan sunwais not only
exposed the misdeeds of local politicians, government engineers, and private
contractors – in a number of cases leading to voluntary restitution – but also
demonstrated the potential for collective action among groups that tend to shun
organised "political" activity.

While the amounts diverted through such means may
seem insignificant to anti-corruption activists pursuing cases of high-level
corruption, the cumulative diversion of resources intended specifically for the
poor, or for local public goods more generally, is enormous. A hint of the
scale of misappropriation in local development schemes is evident from the
outcome of a January 1998 jan sunwai for five gram panchayats (village
councils), where at least Rs 100,000 (US$ 2,500) was unaccounted for in each
village. In one village the amount was estimated at Rs 500,000 (US$ 12,500).
This is just a tiny snapshot of fraud at one point in time on one set of relief
schemes in one locality. Exposure of the mechanics of these everyday forms of
corruption through access to government documents and cross-checking them in
public hearings has helped to fuel local discontent and a willingness to engage
in organised protest against both the specific cases of corruption and the
continued refusal of officials to release information. Indian Administrative
Service (IAS) officer Amitabh Mukhopadhyay has argued that public hearings have
an important educative function: the struggle for access to information
challenges the obscurantist and remote culture of the bureaucracy, and
reinforces democratic notions regarding the obligations of government officials
and elected representatives as public servants.

Although successful in exposing corruption in a
number of localities, jan sunwais have been relatively rare because of
the difficulty in obtaining certified copies of government accounts from
reluctant officials. In response, the MKSS and its allies in Rajasthan’s large
and diverse voluntary sector developed a parallel strategy involving
large-scale public protests extending over weeks. The objective: legislative
and regulatory reforms to provide a legal basis for local efforts to obtain
official documents. The main demand is that citizens be entitled to photocopy
government documents, except those with national-security implications. The
state government has vacillated in response to this demand. In April 1995 the
state’s chief minister made a dramatic promise on the floor of the state
legislature to give citizens the right to photocopy documents relating to local
development works. But the order which followed this after a one-year delay
only granted inspection rights, not permission to photocopying documents. This
made it next to useless for social audits, since certified copies of documents
are needed for use as evidence when registering prima facie cases of
corruption. Photocopying is also a key requirement where illiterate people need
time and assistance to interpret the sometimes technical detail in official
documents.

Another extended sit-in was held in the state
capital of Jaipur in May/June 1997 to protest continued government inaction on
the issue. After 52 days of protest action the state government informed the
demonstrators that an order had been issued six months earlier permitting
photocopying of records relating development works under the formal authority
of local government institutions. The rule, therefore, does not apply to the
PDS, which is under the joint control of the state and central governments, or
to any of the other governance activities which impinge on the lives of
citizens, such as police procedures, the awarding of public-works contracts by
the state government, and so on. Nor does the relevant access-to-information
provision include specific punitive measures for officials which fail to supply
information. As a result, local bureaucrats have been able to continue to
resist the MKSS’s requests for information.

One measure of the impact of the MKSS strategy is
the resistance it has encountered. Aside from incidents of harassment and
intimidation, particularly by elected representatives and their henchmen, one
of the most significant reactions was a state-wide strike of village-level
development officers in 1996. This followed the decision of one district’s
chief administrative officer (or "collector") to issue instructions
allowing the MKSS activists to photocopy documents relating to development
works, in preparation for a public hearing. The village-level development
officers, through their union, refused to comply, arguing that they were
subject only to a government audit, not to what they considered a public
inquisition. Resistance has also been expressed in pronounced foot-dragging on
the part of the administration in launching investigations into corruption
cases exposed through jan sunwais. While some district collectors have
helped to organise special audits to investigate charges, elsewhere bureaucrats
have assisted elected representatives to evade prosecution. In a recent case,
an elected village chairperson who had admitted her guilt in a fraud of Rs
100,000 during a jan sunwai, and who had returned half the amount to the
village fund on the spot, was persuaded by her counterparts in neighbouring
villages in the presence of senior officials to recant and take back the money.
No action has been taken against her.

Both independently, and in emulation of the MKSS,
organisations in other parts of India have also begun to focus on the role of
information as a weapon in the battle for government accountability. Few have
been able to go as far as replicating the jan sunwai method.
Nevertheless, the MKSS has had an impact out of proportion to its size. In
mid-1996, local associations engaged in anti-corruption struggles joined with
other interested groups across India, including the Press Institute of India
and senior faculty members of the National Academy of Administration (which
trains IAS officers), to establish the National Campaign for People’s Right to
Information. This seeks reform of legal provisions relating to the
accessibility of government documents, which continue to be governed by the
Official Secrets Act of 1923. Two draft Freedom of Information Bills were
produced in early 1997, one by a committee appointed by the United Front
coalition government, and the other by the Press Council of India. The collapse
of the United Front government in late 1997 postponed the introduction of the
proposed right-to-information legislation, and its successor has shown little
inclination to revive either the issue or the bill.

Relevance to Contemporary Governance Debates

The idea that government decision-making should be
transparent is nothing new. A range of factors – some of them contradictory –
have pushed it to the centre of contemporary governance debates. For instance,
the concern with transparency is a reaction against both the arbitrary
decision-making found in state-dominated economies and the often
secretive processes by which liberal economic policies are introduced. The link
between transparency and the cognate concept of accountability is, on an
abstract plane, unassailable. In operational terms, however, the connection is
far from obvious. Transparency does not automatically result in accountability.
Moreover, neither term on its own is self-explanatory. Transparency is often
conceived of in terms of making procedures clear and removing discretionary
control, but without a corresponding elaboration of the preconditions necessary
for making clarity produce the desired results. Accountability itself can mean
any number of things: that officials must explain – ie, "account for"
– their actions (which makes accountability almost synonymous with
transparency); that officials must "take responsibility" for their
actions (but whether this is to be judged on procedural grounds or in terms of
impacts is unclear); that elected officials will be made accountable by voters
through elections; and so on. It is the range of meanings to which the two concepts
lend themselves, individually and in tandem, that perhaps explains their
ubiquity. That, as well as their utility as a euphemism for "means of
combating corruption". Government policy-makers, and aid agencies
sensitive to their feelings, are reluctant openly to admit the existence of
corruption. They increasingly refer to the "transparency and
accountability dimensions" of policy initiatives.

These sorts of ambiguities, alongside buzzword
fatigue, make it easy to dismiss movements for transparency as so much
repackaged liberal-pluralist theory – a neutered conceptual form which does
nothing to address existing power inequalities, the tenacity of bureaucratic
cultures, and the impact of trends which have increased the influence of
far-away events on once fairly insulated local politics – in short,
globalisation. But like democracy itself, the idea of transparency maintains
its grip on the popular imagination – or at least the intellectual inclinations
of political analysts. The grassroots work of the MKSS – as well as the
rethinking it has catalysed amongst activists, non-governmental organisations,
the media, and even bureaucrats and politicians – has the capacity to breathe
new life into a concept which is in danger of withering from under-specification
and over-use. When trying to make sense of the MKSS experience – particularly
the way in which information and its link to the idea of transparency is
characterised – one is inevitably drawn to several related debates, if for no
other reason than to situate this experience within a comprehensible frame of
reference. For reasons of space and clarity, we will focus on three areas, each
of which has spawned its own voluminous and often inward-looking literature:
human rights, participatory development, and anti-corruption.

Human Rights

The literature on human rights ranges from the most
practical debates in the study of democracy (e.g., the crafting of national and
international law) to the most abstract (e.g., distinctions between categories
of rights). We will begin from the theoretical perspective, in an attempt to
delineate how it might inform a more nuanced approach to questions of great
practical relevance.

It must first be recognised that almost any
enumeration of desirable rights usually lists the importance of the right to
information, the right to know, or some such related formulation. There is a
perceptible lack of excitement about the value of this entitlement, however. It
is invoked dutifully rather than passionately. The right to information has an
undeniably old-fashioned ring to it. It is, to use the jargon, a
"first-generation" civil-political right, one which elaborates, but
does not appear to redefine, the individual citizen’s relationship to the
state. It is understandable that rights advocates, steeped in the
rhetoric of "ground realities", should be less than enthusiastic
about something which lacks the immediacy of struggles to obtain
"second-generation" rights, such as demands that the state recognise
a right to basic economic necessities like food, shelter, education and
healthcare. The right to information is too abstract for this constituency. It
is, in a different way, just as understandable that rights theorists,
concerned above all with intellectual novelty and sophistication, find it more
appealing to probe the limits of democratic theory by elaborating
"third-generation" rights – that is, "group rights",
particularly those which accord communities an entitlement to cultural
preservation and autonomy. These still-evolving concepts stretch the definition
of rights themselves, in that they question the notion of the rights-bearing
individual as the essential unit of the political community. The right to
information cannot compete in such an alluring marketplace of ideas. It has
thus become damaged goods, branded as quintessentially liberal – the
intellectual equivalent of the death sentence.

There is of course an irony in this dismissive tone
– a tone, incidentally, not absent among some Indian activists and
intellectuals familiar with the MKSS’s work. The right to information is
portrayed as something of little practical relevance to poor and marginalised
people, since they do not possess the means required to actualise it: time,
literacy, appropriate forms of collective action, and so forth. But, given the
very same ground realities that lead rights advocates to dismiss the utility of
first generation rights, there is just as much reason to doubt that poorer people
will benefit materially from the legal provisions "guaranteeing"
second- or third-generation rights. Indeed, optimism on this front in the face
of indifferent or hostile state authorities is, if anything, even less
warranted. If even basic procedural rights, such as due process or the right to
information, are considered beyond the grasp of ordinary people, then why are
the fine-sounding rights declarations concerning socio-economic or cultural
rights any more relevant to the immediate needs of poor and socially
marginalised people?

Some analysts of the encounter between democratic
practice and processes of social and economic transformation – the domain of
political scientists within the field of "development studies" – have
gone even further, questioning the rights agenda itself. Davies argues that
democracy defined in terms of rights is insensitive to the needs of the rural
poor, particularly given their lack of access to resources and their need to
strengthen the basis of their often precarious livelihoods. Based upon a review
of the literature on democratization, Davies concludes that

· [t]he apparent universality of
democratization masks the fact that democrats continue to express their own
urban elitist perceptions of rural people’s needs and interests, rather than
giving a voice to the rural poor’s own understanding of what rights they
require in order to pursue sustainable livelihoods.

That movements for democracy are, by and large, led
by urban elites is not in question. It does not logically follow, however, that
the practice of democratic politics is structurally incapable of generating
vociferous claims for a broader conception of rights. More specifically, the
content of those rights claims need not necessarily be biased towards urban
elites. Davies argues that "resource rights" are the main priorities
of the poor:

· · the right to secure tenure to
land and access to other resources; the right to food and other economic
securities; the right to credit on terms that are not usurious; the right to
pay taxes at moments which take account of seasonal income and expenditure
flows; or the right to protections from preventable illnesses.

Her complaint, then, is not with rights per se,
but with the content of the rights which preoccupy elite groups. This leads to
a puzzling discrepancy. Davies’ enumeration of the reasons why the poor have
generally been unable to participate meaningfully in rights-based democracy
includes their "limited access to formal information". This reasoning
thus contradicts her sharply drawn contrast between political rights and
"resource rights". Though the right to information is often
denigrated (though not explicitly by Davies) purely as a civil-political right,
its absence (by Davies’ own logic) limits the capacity of resource rights to
enter the agenda. The MKSS’s political evolution, as well as its success in
allowing a broad cross-section of movements to see the practical relevance of
legal instruments for obtaining information, strengthens the impression that an
artificial dichotomy has been constructed between resource rights and the right
to know – or what is often broadly dichotomised as substantive versus formal
democracy, or the difference between democratic outcomes and democratic
process.

These debates are of more than just academic
interest. The relationship between India’s civil-liberties and mass-movement
constituencies has oscillated between collaboration and conflict. Mohanty
argues that

· · [t]here was a time when
liberal advocates in the civil liberties movement used to regard the struggle
for minimum wage as a political activity of the radicals external to their
movement. Conversely, the radicals, preoccupied with their mass movement for
workers’ and peasants’ rights, undermined the significance of civil liberties
considering them bourgeois procedures meant only for legitimation of the
political order.

Things changed somewhat after the internal
"Emergency" declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi during 1975-77.
The post-Emergency period, including the excesses of the Terrorists and
Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, and other atrocities committed with
even less legal formality, "gave rise to a new momentum in the civil
liberties and democratic movements in India". The interlinkage between the
two movements (indeed, the necessity of each for the other) became more widely
recognised. This took the form of an emphasis on "democratic rights"
or "peoples rights". Mohanty cites the assertion of Haragopal and
Balagopal "that human rights movements are interconnected with movements
of peasants, tribals, workers, women and displaced people and are both
complementary to them and autonomous at the same time". The idea of
peoples rights, according to Mohanty, "emphasises the interconnection
of these rights and the struggle for their realisation".

In a similar vein, Aditya Nigam argues that,
despite their emphasis on state structures and legal process, movements built
around rights-based claims have not outlived their usefulness. As with other
concepts once hostage solely to their origins in European history – secularism
and representation, to name but two – the idea of rights possesses a degree
of plasticity, and can be re-engineered to suit Indian conditions. Nigam
argues that rights-based movements need not necessarily develop a dependency
syndrome, expecting the state to initiate and assume the role of implementing
agency for all progressive change. Rather, state response creates the
conditions for additional forms of mobilisation. Granting the dangers of
working in an idiom saddled with such weighty intellectual baggage, Nigam
argues that "popular movements nevertheless cannot do away with the
language of rights as it remains the sole language of proclaiming their
subjectivity and agency". In other words, political practice is both
constrained and propelled by the domain of ideas – ideas which may have a
foreign provenance, but which continue to be adapted to new purposes.

These two propositions – that the nature and
utility of rights are linked to the process by which they are obtained, and
that the meaning of established democratic concepts can be transformed through
political practice – are both amply confirmed by the experience of the MKSS and
the larger movement it has spawned. The unsuccessful attempts by other
organisations to emulate the MKSS’s methods is instructive. Chetna Andolan, an
activist group in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh (India’s most populous),
held a jan sunwai in early 1997, but failed to build the necessary
popular following, or to sensitise local people and officials to the purpose
and larger relevance of this exercise. The negative result demonstrated, among
other things, that a movement’s impact is critically conditioned by the route
through which people arrive at the decision to assert that information is
theirs by right.

As for investing old concepts with new meanings,
the MKSS has met with enormous success. It has done so mostly through example,
but also through skilful articulation of its beliefs. Public debate on issues
of transparency in India now routinely refers to the central importance of the
right to information. More importantly, people are far more aware of the
potential of this right to contribute to the concerns of ordinary people – that
is, they have grasped the relationship between opacity and the perpetuation of
everyday forms of corruption. The right to information has leapt into the
national spotlight from time to time over the past 25 years, most notably at
times when centre-left coalitions have edged aside the Congress party to take
power in New Delhi. The idea was discussed during the first non-Congress
government during 1977-79, then more forcefully during the government of V.P.
Singh in 1989-90, and finally in 1996-98 by the United Front coalition
government. The key point is that over the past five years, the MKSS’s efforts
to project the right to information as something which can be sought and used
by ordinary people – and in a collective fashion – has brought about a marked
transformation in its perceived status and importance. The MKSS experience has,
in this sense, played a major role in changing the tenor of public debate –
media coverage, academic discussions, party-political rhetoric, and activist
mobilisation – on both the nature of corruption and the potential role of
access to information in combating it.

It is also not an exaggeration to say that the
MKSS’s mode of organising and approach to operationalising access to
information has had a bearing on how the right to information is situated
within Indian legal debates. Until the mid-1990s, the right to information had
been most closely associated with the right to free expression. India thus
followed international precedent, which tended to group the right to
information with press freedom, as in the United States, where the Freedom of
Information Act is associated with the press in general, and has received
judicial affirmation under the free-expression provisions in the U.S. Bill of
Rights. Another example of this precedent is Article 19 of the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, in which Clause 2 states that the
"right to freedom of expression" includes "freedom to seek,
receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds". The concern is
clearly with official censorship, rather than government transparency. Thus,
Amnesty International has no difficulty subsuming a brief discussion of India’s
right-to-information movement within a discussion of the difficulties its staff
members have had in communicating with Indian civil liberties organisations.
Similarly, an analysis of the relevant provisions in the South African
constitution portrays the press as the only constituency within civil society
whose activities are worth analysing with respect to freedom of information.

The MKSS, in its grassroots organising and
practical work, as well as in its own documentation, prefers to locate the
right to information within the Indian Constitution’s provisions guaranteeing
the right to life and livelihood. This is more than simply ideology. Rulings in
Indian courts – most notably a decision granting an environmental activist
group access to planning documents in the state of Maharashtra – justified the
right to information in terms of just such rights. Non-judicial legal analysis
has taken similar interpretative twists. S.P. Sathe, one of India’s leading
legal scholars has argued that the Official Secrets Act and Section 123 of the
Evidence Act – both dating from the colonial period – "are not really
restrictions on freedom of speech and expression but are restrictions on the
citizen’s right to know how he is being governed...[which] must emanate from
every individual’s right to personal liberty guaranteed by article 21 and the
right to equality guaranteed by article 14 of the constitution". A citizen,
he argues, "wants to know on what grounds the height of a dam is
determined not because she wants to speak against it but because she must
ascertain whether decisions affecting her life are being taken objectively and
in public interest".

Participatory Development

What the writings of Davies, Mohanty, Nigam and
Sathe have in common is an emphasis on participation, an indication that active
engagement on the part of socially excluded groups has become central both to
redefining the rights agenda and to pressing for the recognition of highly
specified rights within that agenda. The MKSS’s work highlights an additional
dimension: collective grassroots participation in the exercise of rights, even
when the right to information has been only partially recognised by particular
sites within the state.

In seeking correlates to the MKSS’s jan sunwais
one is therefore inevitably drawn to the literature on participatory
development, if for no other reason than its claims to practicality. Besides,
some of the sentiments and concerns of participatory development seem to
parallel aspects of the MKSS’s approach: the validating of local knowledge, the
ethics of "putting the last first", the focus on development
programmes which target the poor. This large contemporary literature on methods
for increasing the voice of poor and marginalised people is thus seemingly
inextricable from notions of transparency and accountability. The underlying
assumption is that if more people participate in decision-making, there will be
greater information-sharing, and greater chances that citizens will detect and
oppose the pilfering of resources meant for them. However, the literature on
participatory development rarely applies itself directly to anti-corruption
strategies, nor does it take the same kinds of risks as the
right-to-information approach in challenging the prerogatives of local
authorities by demanding open accounts. Instead the focus both in theory and
practice is on the bottom-up generation of information to provide planners with
better, more "authentic" sources of information.

Within the field of participatory development, the
nearest approximation to the MKSS approach – which for the purpose of narrowing
the terminological gap we can call "participatory auditing" – is what
is known as "participatory monitoring and evaluation". Participatory
monitoring and evaluation elicits people’s perceptions of the utility of
development interventions initiated on their behalf. The purpose is to
illuminate gaps between people’s expressed needs and project responses, and the
differential impact of such projects on diverse social groups. Here, as with
the rights literature, the right to information has tended to be seen, when
considered at all, as rather behind the times. There are two lines of critique,
one ideological and one practical. First, the idea of gaining access to
official documentation to audit accounts is considered a mechanical exercise,
focused on questioning developmental statistics rather than the objectives and
meanings of development itself. Second, auditing is seen as a prerogative of
liberals and literates – of people able to engage in technical details, or in
legal tussles over information-release – but not of much use to poor and often
illiterate people. For instance, in a 1998 workshop organised by the
London-based New Economics Foundation, a number of Indian NGOs were asked to
rate the effectiveness of several techniques for social auditing. The ‘right to
information’ was among the choices listed, but was not seen by any of the NGOs
as particularly relevant to their work. This is not surprising, since the
right-to-information is not a technique – and without further explication from
the workshop organisers, it can easily appear less radical than methods which
allow people to voice grievances and prioritise needs.

Four aspects of participatory monitoring and
evaluation contrast with the more confrontational approach to accountability
pioneered by the MKSS. First, participatory monitoring and evaluation exercises
originate from outside the community – from funders seeking to replace expert
analysis with local opinion – and are viable only when the assent of dominant
local interests is obtained. Second, it is usually applied to discrete
projects, not to large-scale government programmes or the procedures used in
the management of local-government resources. Third, the emphasis in
participatory monitoring and evaluation, as in the participatory development
literature more generally, is on the generation of information from the
grassroots; there is less emphasis on direct confrontation between people’s
knowledge and official accounts. The involvement of people in generating
information about their own lives, perceptions, and needs, and the evolution of
ever-more-ingenious methods for enabling illiterate people to keep records
about their natural-resource endowments, time-use patterns, community
relations, expenditure priorities, and so on, is of course a radical departure
from top-down development planning. But there is a big difference between
providing a resource map of a community, or an opinion about the impact of a
project, and demanding access to detailed expenditure records and subjecting
these to collective verification – checking, for instance, whether regulations
governing the award of contracts have been violated or whether money has been
spent on sub-standard materials or diverted to officially prohibited uses. To
do this implies direct confrontations with authorities – both to gain access to
documentation, and to demand an explanation from officials for apparent
discrepancies.

This leads to the fourth important contrast between
the two approaches: participatory techniques are remarkably apolitical in their
implicit assumptions that the generation of information will actually flow
‘from the bottom up’ – that policy makers will be moved to respond to the
alternatives presented in grassroots-generated information. The indifference of
policy-makers to the perspectives of the poor is acknowledged in the writings
of participation gurus like Robert Chambers. But the proposed solution –
changing the elitist culture of the bureaucracy through training and
inculcation of new pro-people values – hardly offers a viable replacement for
the inducements bureaucrats earn from looking the other way when regulations
are violated and mediating the access of politicians and local business elites
to state funds. It is hard to see how people’s knowledge can translate into
power without critical engagements with the bureaucracy, or exposure and
prosecution of corrupt practices – all supported by a social movement to
protect the poor from the inevitable backlash.

Another area in which participatory approaches have
been demonstrated to be apolitical is in their general assumption of consensus
in the nature of participatory exercises. In assuming consensus, different
perspectives can be silenced, a problem which has been observed with regard to
the subtle filtering-out of dissensus along gender and class lines. Perhaps it
is precisely because participatory methods lend themselves, in practice, to
non-confrontational applications that they have been adopted by institutions as
remote from the grassroots as the World Bank. There, as many have pointed out,
such methods are often stripped of their originally subversive content to
become a cost-saving strategy.

The confrontational element of efforts to assert a
right to information explains why relatively few development NGOs engaged in
participatory development have focused on the right to information. Many
development NGOs engage in service delivery in partnership with the state;
indeed, a substantial part of economic liberalisation is the farming out of
service-delivery functions to cheaper, more efficient NGOs. Such NGOs very
rarely have an interest in confronting local authorities. It would make
collaboration with local government departments even more difficult.
Development NGOs which are foreign-funded have much to lose from confrontation
with public authorities. Activities perceived as subversive can be punished by
revoking access to foreign contributions. Above and beyond these
considerations, there is always a risk, in confrontations over probity in
accounts, of the pot calling the kettle black. Many NGOs would not welcome
public scrutiny of their own accounts. The peculiar organisational form of many
development NGOs, in uneven transition from voluntary organisations to
reasonably well-funded development bureaucracies, often leaves much to be
desired in terms of accurate and transparent book-keeping, fair labour
relations, and democratic decision-making structures.

It is no accident that the response of two
important development NGOs in Rajasthan to the challenge of taking up the right
to information has been a preliminary focus on their own internal transparency.
The Social Work Resource Centre in Tilonia, for instance, held a public hearing
on its own accounts in 1997, largely in response to a smear campaign waged by a
state government eager to neutralise the momentum of the right-to-information
movement. Similarly, the URMUL Trust, a federation of 14 organisations in
northern Rajasthan, concluded after an internal retreat on the subject of
"Advocacy, Transparency, and the Right to Information" in early 1999
that it should concentrate on improving transparency within and between its own
affiliates before taking the issue into its work with villagers. The
distinctions between the MKSS’s approach and participatory approaches which now
seem rather conventional has also been made by Indian analysts, who argue that
the most pressing need is "that the people are conscienticised, mobilised
and organised to fight against corruption, oppression and injustice. This view
is radical, not sharing the conventional view of community participation".

Corruption and Anti-Corruption

A right to information – even if well-crafted
legally, used widely, and enforced rigorously – is not the sole answer to
corruption. It is necessary, though not sufficient. However, the MKSS experiment,
and many of the other local initiatives and campaigns for regulatory change it
has inspired, provide a valuable new perspective from which to assess the
international literature on corruption and anti-corruption. In probing its
shortcomings, three common themes stand out: (1) an overemphasis on the state
as cause and remedy; (2) a failure to recognise the role of social movements in
highlighting the existence of different forms of corruption; and (3) a limited
conception of the relationship between information and accountability.

Most studies of corruption focus on its causes or
consequences, rather than methods of combating it. The cause most often cited
is a policy environment that bestows undue discretion to state officials, while
consequences are usually measured in terms of overall economic efficiency.
There is undoubted merit to this logic. However, its main implication is that
policy reforms which transfer power from state to market agents will suffice to
combat corruption. Evidence from a wide range of countries which have
liberalised and deregulated their economies over the past twenty years
indicates that policy reform, while helpful in some cases, has fallen well
short of original expectations.

Moreover, states still have major functions to perform
– at the very least, protecting poorer and vulnerable sections of society from
the dislocations that liberalisation can generate. State officials will, for
instance, continue to enjoy great discretion in implementing anti-poverty
programmes as well as in enforcing environmental and labour regulations.
Corruption will thus remain one of the greatest obstacles to the efficient
delivery of development resources to the poor in developing countries. The
scope for subjecting the management of anti-poverty programmes to competitive
pressures is severely limited, especially in such inherently statist
interventions as employment-generation schemes or means-tested food subsidies.
As a result, the emphasis in the policy literature has been on establishing
means of "restraint", particularly civil-service reforms which
provide for punishing errant officials while adequately remunerating those who
perform their jobs effectively. Hence, the continued stress on such
public-administration mechanisms as ombudsmen, independent inspector-generals,
and quasi-judicial vigilance commissioners. These are potentially valuable, but
they are not enough.

Given the high profile which the notion of civil
society has been accorded in the literature on democratic accountability, it is
somewhat surprising that it has been assigned such a low profile in
official reports on how to restrain corrupt activity. While acknowledging the
importance of more transparent public accounts, a recent IMF paper continues to
downplay the potential contribution of grassroots associations. The authors
advocate a form of financial transparency that would appeal to an elite
audience interested in "policy dialogue", but much less so to
movements attempting to document and confront the misdeeds of local-level officials.
The World Bank’s 1997 World Development Report (WDR), to take perhaps
the most egregious example, devotes only a small section at the end of the
chapter on combating corruption to the role of civil society organisations.
This prioritisation is based on a seemingly unassailable political logic: the
marginalised groups which suffer from these forms of corruption – particularly
the rural poor and women – tend to be weakly organised, if at all; they are
thus fairly unlikely candidates for the formidable job of holding government
officials accountable.

In this context, two features of the MKSS-inspired
initiatives are noteworthy. The first is the genuinely grassroots foundations
and character of these movements. The Rajasthan-based MKSS and other core NGOs
involved in the right-to-information movement appear to have been successful in
mobilising poor rural people to prioritise the seemingly abstract right to
information as a key element in their struggles to achieve accountability from
local authorities and to enhance their livelihood prospects. The focus on the
right to information offers a constructive approach to tackling the everyday
forms of corruption which most directly affect ordinary people. The second
feature is women’s high degree of participation in local right-to-information
struggles. This is particularly striking given that women’s civil-society
activism in many parts of the world tends not to be oriented to direct
engagement with the state, because of the many obstacles and exclusions women
experience in public political arenas. Right-to-information activism provides a
means for women to appreciate the way that participation in movements against
corruption can translate into livelihood securities.

The organisational dynamics and political tactics
of India’s right-to-information movement also furnish at least two new
perspectives on the diverse forms and differential impacts of corruption.
First, while pursuing rights which alter the governance framework – rather than
simply protesting individual acts of government malfeasance – the movement has
progressed well beyond the focus on accountability in government expenditure.
As a by-product of both the coalition-building exercise which forged the
movement, and the utilisation of the social-audit technique, the multifaceted
nature of corruption has been highlighted. For instance, activists working on
issues of violence against women, who have become central to Rajasthan’s
right-to-information campaign, contributed to the movement a greater sense of
the sorts of corruption that plague the law-enforcement and criminal-justice
systems. Similarly, the harassment of those involved in the village-based
public hearings by local officials highlighted the extent to which various arms
of the state administration are routinely subjected to interference by those
with political power.

Second, the right-to-information movement focuses
attention on the complex impact of corruption on the poor. It is useful
to conceive of these effects as operating along three dimensions of
citizenship. Each corresponds to a critical relationship in which citizens must
engage – with the state, with the market, and with civil and political society.
The three overlap substantially, and it is through such spillover effects that
they have their most damaging impact on the poor.

Pilfering of state resources intended to
benefit the poor (such as subsidised food) is the most obvious culprit. And
indeed, as we have seen, the Rajasthan right-to-information movement originated
in part from localised efforts to confront corruption in the Public
Distribution System, through which essential commodities are distributed at
subsidised prices. The coalescence of the Rajasthan movement was also
instrumental in increasing popular awareness of the linkage between different
forms of corruption. Resources available for targeted schemes, for instance,
are reduced ex ante through tax evasion by the rich. And when resources
devoted to programmes intended for universal provision (for poor and non-poor
alike) are diverted through corrupt practices, this has a disproportionately
negative impact on the poor, since unlike many other segments of society they
are ill-prepared to substitute private provision.

The ability of the poor to achieve market
gains is also impaired by corruption. Not only does the draining of public
resources for such public goods as education and healthcare impair the market
prospects of the poor, but the failure to enforce laws regulating market
behaviour – which is due more to corruption than administrative incompetence –
has dire consequences for many of their number. In the industrial sector, these
largely concern labour and environmental-health standards. In rural settings,
the problems centre on land-tenure guidelines, credit-market regulations,
minimum wages for agricultural workers, and the collusive practices of
officials charged with enforcing standards in the buying and selling operations
of market centres. While these examples concern the economic relationships of
the poor as producers, it is essential to recognise the ill effects that can
also befall them as consumers. When policing of the market is lax, collusive
relationships between firms and other organised economic agents (such as
agricultural cooperatives) can impede whatever scant benefits poorer citizens
may have been able to derive from their productive activities or from
redistributive programmes implemented by the state.

The third dimension of citizenship through which
corruption affects the poor concerns participation in civil and political
society. This is clearly related to the first two dimensions insofar as
these forms of participation are impeded by resource deprivation and a hostile
market environment. But in addition, as MKSS activists have pointed out
repeatedly in their exchanges with both government representatives and other
voluntary organisations, the skimming of state resources at local levels tends
further to enrich those groups in rural society responsible for denying social
and economic opportunity to the poor in the first place. Their collective
prestige and influence, combined with the collusive relationships they forge
with state officials, can thwart the nascent self-help activities of poorer
groups in the political sphere. For instance, state officials whose services
have been bought to rig agricultural markets and evade taxation are not likely
to call out the police against their powerful accomplices when they engage in
violence or intimidation to prevent poorer people from attending village
assemblies or organising their own public meetings. It is through such
sustained relationships between local elites and the state administration that
networks of corruption – spanning the domains of developmental activity, market
transaction and organised politics – have their most devastating impact on the
poor.

The international literature on combating
corruption, it must be stressed, is not silent on the importance of
information. But in spelling out the means by which information can lead to
accountability, the emphasis is on relatively uncontroversial forms of
information. It thus has much in common with the recent attempts by politicians
and bureaucrats in India to pre-empt radical change by unveiling (and loudly
trumpeting) their own rather tame transparency initiatives. These tend to
centre on village-level "information kiosks", which detail the
existence of government schemes and the basics of eligibility requirements, or
"public-works signboards", which indicate the name of the concerned
contracting firm, the amount of funds sanctioned and the quantity of materials
purchased. Not surprisingly, these are seldom maintained properly. But even if
they were, they would not provide the in-depth information required for groups
of local citizens to verify whether funds have been misappropriated. Without
access to supporting documentation which indicates how individual applications
under anti-poverty schemes were assessed, or how and to whom funds were
disbursed, there is little chance of exposing either biased application of
eligibility criteria in beneficiary-selection or diversion of funds in
implementation. Without expense receipts, employment and wage registers, and
timely access to building sites, instances of fraud in public-works projects
are similarly undetectable.

The most common conceptual link between information
and accountability in the international literature on corruption is through the
idea of information-generation. As with participatory development techniques,
this strand of thinking prioritises the need for eliciting information from the
public at large. World Bank staffers Gray and Kaufman argue that
anti-corruption "practitioners need to search for the information
gathering and dissemination methods that can have the quickest and most direct impacts".
They cite in this connection – as do a great many surveys on corruption – the
work of the Public Affairs Centre (PAC), an NGO based in the south Indian city
of Bangalore founded by Samuel Paul, himself a former World Bank employee. The
PAC’s method involves surveying citizens’ levels of satisfaction with public
services and their perceptions of corruption. The result is a "report
card", which is then widely publicised through the press. This is clearly
a good idea, but with severe limitations.

The problem is the tendency in the policy
literature to confuse this sort of information gathering with methods which
involve a more demanding form of participation from citizens, such as
confronting officials to obtain state-held documentation and organising themselves
to audit accounts. A 1997 UNDP report on corruption cites the PAC report-card
methodology specifically in the context of "freedom of information",
erroneously equating the two. Like the World Bank’s WDR, cited earlier,
the UNDP analysis neglects the potential role of civil society. The chapters on
corruption focus on "reducing incentives for payoffs",
"enforcing anti-corruption laws", "reforming the civil
service", and "instituting checks and balances". Its one section
on "information" treats the "private sector" rather than
less corporate forms of civil society as the main agent of opposing corruption.
The report broadly endorses the idea of publishing financial statements, but
not in disaggregated forms and not at the very local levels at which people’s
capacity to verify and falsify data is most valuable. When the report discusses
freedom of information, the focus is on its ability to contribute to proper
voting decisions, and to spur "other avenues of protest", including
legal action.

The PAC’s own conclusions from its 1998 report card
on urban services in Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay) are an indication of the
naïve approach to civic action which international agencies seem prepared to
buy into. The PAC’s "recommendations" are that "[t]he service
providers for the essential services rated worst…should clean up their act,
realising that slum dwellers are as much citizens of Mumbai as any other
resident.". Other anodyne prescriptions suggest that "[t]he residents
of the slums themselves could become more vocal in bringing their problems to
the notice of the agencies and in demanding redress", and that "NGOs
could act as catalysts…by using the findings as weapons in their drive to
obtain better public services for their fellow citizens". Such
findings can be considered "weapons" only if the politicians and
bureaucrats in question are ignorant of the service-delivery problems in the
first place. Most, in fact, are already aware of the dismal state of public
amenities in India’s slums. The MKSS approach begins from the assumption that
what would motivate officials to take remedial action is concrete evidence of
their complicity in misappropriating funds intended for addressing these
problems. A right to information makes this possible, though not inevitable. It
requires associations of people willing to confront authority.

Finally, the international literature on corruption
– like the rights literature – conflates the right to expression and the right
to information. The UNDP report puts it this way: "Anticorruption
activists should also support freedom of information laws and oppose
restrictive libel laws, especially those that give special protection to public
officials". The World Bank’s Gray and Kaufman offer a near carbon copy:
"Both the introduction and the continuance of restrictive libel laws
protecting politicians and public officials must be opposed to safeguard
citizens’ freedoms of expression and information…." The problem with
overlooking this important difference is that it divests the right to
information of the radical implications which the MKSS experience has so
effectively highlighted. While arguing that "[s]ecretiveness has helped
elites and politicians keep corrupt practices under wraps", Gray and
Kaufman nevertheless ignore the possibility that the any civic associations
other than the press could take on the responsibility of participating in the
exposure of misdeeds.

Conclusion

The MKSS’s work has prompted a serious rethink on a
range of interconnected issues: the multifaceted nature of corruption, the
links between its different manifestations, the importance of mobilising people
to participate in exposing it, and, perhaps most importantly, the relevance of
the right to information to the concerns of ordinary people interested less in
the freedom of expression than in securing livelihoods. These conceptual shifts
can be seen most clearly in the changed contours of public debates on
corruption generally, and on the link between transparency and accountability
in particular. And while there has been huge support for the MKSS’s demand for
legislative and regulatory reform to enshrine the right to information, the
fact that its jan sunwai method has not been widely emulated raises
several important issues. This lack of replication by no means invalidates the
MKSS’s work, much less the theoretical implications which this paper has sought
to derive from it. But it is something which does require consideration.

It must first be acknowledged that the MKSS’s local
success and wider influence has been at least partly due to its skill in
developing a network of support within the elite Indian Administrative Service
(IAS), among Delhi-based intellectuals and activists, and within the regional
and national media. Press coverage, influenced by the extremely thoughtful and
articulate people associated with the MKSS, has contributed enormously to
linking the idea of a right to information with debates on governance and
transparency. The MKSS’s success in forging this support network, in turn, stems
largely from the personal and professional connections of its most well-known
leader, Ms Aruna Roy, who cut short her career as an IAS officer after just
seven years on the job to pursue a different sort of life. The MKSS’s ability
to exploit such connections does not contradict the organisation’s stated
commitment to pursue issues of local concern and to subsist on local resources.
Nevertheless, it is important to bear in mind that the elite-level contacts of
several people associated with the MKSS afford its activities a degree of
protection which would likely be lacking for other groups operating in less
fortuitous circumstances. On the other hand, the MKSS’s area of operations is
among the poorest and most economically deprived parts of India, one where social
relations between dominant and subordinate groups are at their most oppressive.
So MKSS’s example should have a chance of inspiring groups facing less
difficult conditions, even if their personnel lack the same social and
political clout.

Indeed, one of the MKSS’s most enduring
achievements has been to demonstrate to other groups in India’s vast and varied
civil society – from development NGOs to social movements – the importance of
access to information to their own fields of endeavour, whether they seek to
improve government service delivery, end police abuses, ensure compliance with
environmental and planning regulations, or enforce national protections for the
rights of women, tribal communities, or children. Few such groups are yet in a
position to confront authority through jan sunwais, and in many cases
their issues might not lend themselves so starkly to such a process. But if the
movement to demand that government formalise the right to information is
successful, other organisations might not face conditions as hostile as the
MKSS has. It is important to remember that it has organised jan sunwais
on the basis of information obtained without a legal entitlement, and through
public meetings which bypass the statutorily recognised (and constitutionally
protected) village assemblies, which in most parts of Rajasthan are moribund
political institutions whose democratic functioning is impaired by the
continued existence of constraining social institutions. The MKSS has had to
improvise on a make-shift platform, where successors may have the advantage of
a script and a proper stage.

This is not to say that legal recognition – in the
form of national legislation, or even a constitutional amendment – would mean
speedy implementation. Indian activists are firm in their conviction that the
struggle for people’s rights merely enters a new phase once they receive
official recognition. The outcome of the MKSS’s own work demonstrates this
quite conclusively: the Government of Rajasthan still refuses to release
information about the status of corruption cases registered on the basis of
evidence produced by the public hearings, much less the details of how the
investigations are being conducted. Witness lists, affidavits, audit reports –
are all still confidential. So is a two-year old report from a committee formed
by the state government to advise on means to bring about openness in
government. This unavailable report stands as an invisible reminder of the
elusiveness of transparency.