Morung Express News
Dimapur | October 12
Noted RTI Activist Preeti Sampat today said that development funds pouring in the name of public welfare should be ‘checked’ and not allowed to be siphoned off through fraudulent means by corrupt politicians and bureaucrats. “People should start using this phenomenal right of information and start demanding to look at the records on where all this money has being spent”, the Mazdoor Kisaan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) activist said during the one-day participatory and practical workshop organized by PANOS, South Asia and The Morung Express held at Highway 39 Conference Hall Dimapur on Thursday.
Sampat, who has worked with the MKSS in Rajasthan shared her vast experience about how basic livelihood issues were first raised through the MKSS with involvement of the people, which then led to demand for information on minimum wages and government infrastructure programmes, sparking off, in the process, a national movement for freedom of information. She had been involved in the movement since 1998.
“It is India’s rural poor which is behind the RTI movement and people in Nagaland should also start using this phenomenal right”, Sampat encouraged in her discourse while underlining the fact that right to information has been addressed most effectively in the rural areas of India, where peoples’ movements have shown how information can empower common people in their daily lives.
Pretti Sampat also informed on how by 1994, the MKSS hit upon a new, empowering strategy, based on the idea of a ‘public hearing’.
The MKSS was able to bring people together to facilitate discussion on development issues and official documents relating to construction of school buildings, panchayat bhawans, dams, bridges and other local structures were revealed at such public hearings. “The right to information and the right to life and survival thus became united in peoples’ minds”, she said.
The RTI activist who traveled all the way from Rajasthan, the epicenter of the Right to Information movement in India, however cautioned against ‘forces’ of resistance in particular by the entrenched bureaucracy and shared her experience on how it was the bureaucracy which strongly resisted RTI.
Significantly, even as the Right to Information (RTI) Act completed one year of its existence today, the one day participatory workshop organized by PANOS, South Asia and The Morung Express was able to conclude that as far as Nagaland goes, it rates poorly when it comes to public awareness and advocacy of the RTI Act. Several suggestions were put forward including greater public awareness of the Act; need to initiate advocacy groups specifically for RTI and taking up certain concrete issues to start the ball rolling. It is expected that a follow up of today’s meeting will be taken up.
