I am a resident of Rohillapur village in Noida’s Sector 132 and my father is the village pradhan (elected head). Being aware of the problems plaguing the locals, especially farmers, and the Noida Authority officials turning a deaf ear to them, I couldn’t just sit and do nothing. My journey of filing Right to Information (RTI) pleas started five years ago, in 2013, when I was a college student. I knew little about how to work this public weapon but had heard a lot about its efficacy in the media.
I was determined to fight for the people of the rural Noida which was not made of glass-and-concrete buildings. I listed the problems in the area and then began to ascertain, through RTI, who was accountable for the sorry state of affairs. It was slow work but paid off. After initial success of my RTI petitions, I was motivated to probe larger issues.
I learnt how to use RTI to fight corruption; for instance how to weed out the parking mafia in the region that was fleecing people with their arbitrary rates that varied according to the whims of each contractor. Thanks to the effort of my multiple RTI pleas, the Noida authority fixed the parking rate and the revenue collected this way goes directly to the authority, instead of the contractor.
Of course, I made enemies in my pursuit of a better Noida. My efforts had struck down the extra income of many senior officers and the parking mafia. While I did not receive any threats directly, I was warned by a senior authority official to stay alert as I had upset many powerful people. A relative of mine was told by a private contractor on social media to inform me to stay away from the “activism”.
Not that I cared much about such threats. All these years, I have worked not for myself but in national interest and to empower and inform people about the RTI Act. I consider this power to be one of the most powerful rights that Indian citizens have in the country’s recent history. At the same time, I have observed how Public Information Officers (PIOs) are often reluctant to divulge crucial information and try to delay or transfer the query to another department.
But if the applicant is focused enough, the details so revealed often end up being shocking. Through RTI applications, I once exposed a fake web page running in the name of the President of India which was pushing a communal propaganda. It was soon deactivated. My queries to the government have also forced policymakers to provide relief to the affected in many cases.
All these years, I have worked to dig out the truth from the huge government machinery and have penned and summarised my labour in a booklet titled ‘A Common Man’s Guide to the RTI Act, 2005’ that is available free of cost.