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.