Aruna Roy and the Birth of a People's Movement in India-1

HKS128

Case Number 1929.0

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ This case was drafted by Pratibha Krishnamurthy for Kenneth Winston, Lecturer in Ethics at the Harvard Kennedy School. It was funded by a grant from the HKS Executive Education Program, and edited by Kenneth Winston in collaboration with Pamela Varley of the Kennedy School Case Program. HKS cases are developed solely as the basis for class discussion. Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management. Copyright © 2010 President and Fellows of Harvard College. No part of this publication may be reproduced, revised, translated, stored in a retrieval system, used in a spreadsheet, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the express written consent of the Case Program. For orders and copyright permission information, please visit our website at caseweb.hks.harvard.edu or send a written request to Case Program, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 79 John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138.

Aruna Roy and the Birth of a People’s Movement in India

In 2005, the Parliament of India enacted a law giving citizens of India access to the records of

central, state, and local governments. Under the law’s provisions, any citizen may request information

regarding official acts from any public authority, which is required to reply expeditiously. Officials who

refuse or delay such requests, or provide false information, or destroy information are liable to be fined or

have disciplinary actions taken against them. Many individuals and organizations were involved in the long

and arduous struggle to get this legislation enacted. However, one individual, in particular, is regarded by

many observers as having played a key role in empowering citizens to exercise the democratic right to make

their government transparent and accountable. Aruna Roy was an idealistic, well-educated young

professional woman who, despite being born to an upper caste family, grew up with a deep commitment to

improving the lot of the poor and the socially marginalized, helping them attain greater power over their

lives. Her challenge was to figure out the best way to do that.

A Child of Independence

Born in the southern city of Chennai in 1946, only a year before India’s independence, Aruna Roy

came to maturity in parallel with the fledgling republic itself and found her vocation in making sure the new

country lived up to its own finest commitments and ideals. A vocation in public service was a core element

of the inheritance Aruna received from a family known over several generations for its social conscience,

unorthodox beliefs, and commitment to egalitarian principles.1

1 Biographical details are drawn from the official biography by Lorna Kalaw-Tiroland, issued by the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation,

Her maternal grandmother was well

educated for her times and deeply involved in volunteer work to help the urban poor and marginalized

communities. Her daughter Hema, Aruna’s mother, was sent to first-rate schools, where she excelled in

mathematics and physics (as well as sports); studied classical Sanskrit; read literature in several languages;

and played the veena, a South Indian classical instrument. Hema defied convention in her marriage, waiting

until the age of twenty-five to marry E. D. Jayaram, a lawyer from a different Brahmin sub-caste. Jayaram

also came from a family of social activists. Jayaram’s great uncle, for example, had organized the first strike

of rickshaw pullers in Chennai after returning from his legal studies in London. In addition to practicing law,

Jayaram was sent to study at Shantiniketan, a school founded by the poet and Nobel Prize winner

http://www.rmaf.org.ph/Awardees/Biography/BiographyRoyAru.htm.

http://www.rmaf.org.ph/Awardees/Biography/BiographyRoyAru.htm

HKS Case Program 2 of 21 Case Number 1929.0

Rabindranath Tagore. Jayaram joined the independence movement and later became a civil servant in the

new government of India. All the while, he wrote and published articles on music and film criticism in

English.

Aruna Roy’s family rejected orthodox beliefs about religion and caste; rather, she and her siblings

were encouraged to be free-thinkers and respect all castes and cultures. In political matters, Gandhi was a

prominent influence on the whole family, and his philosophy became an integral part of Aruna’s thinking. “I

have lived with Gandhi all my life,” she reports. Though she was a toddler when Gandhi was assassinated in

1948, Aruna says she “emotionally remembers” his death and “can feel the anguish even today.” With this

upbringing, Aruna absorbed deep commitments to equality and justice, which were reinforced by M. N. Roy

(no relation), a prominent political theorist and exponent of Radical Humanism and founder of Communist

parties in India and Mexico. Aruna mentions Gandhi and Roy, in particular, as her heroes, not only because

of their crusading work and beliefs but “because they were so true to themselves.”2

Aruna attended Indraprastha College, a nondenominational women’s institution in New Delhi,

where she majored in English Literature. After two more years of graduate work at the University of Delhi,

she sought a career that would help her pursue a vocation in public service. In 1968, at the age of twenty-

two, she was one of ten women who passed the rigorous examinations to qualify for the Indian

Administrative Service, the elite civil servants—often referred to as the “steel frame” of Indian

government—who manage affairs of state. (Each year about 300,000 applicants sit for these examinations,

and about 100 candidates are selected.) For Aruna, taking her place within this prestigious, overwhelmingly

male preserve was a feminist choice, a choice “of wanting to work, and work with dignity and work

independently.”

3

In short order, however, she would grow impatient with the IAS.

Finding Her Way

In the IAS, Aruna’s personal bearing—her simplicity of dress and refusal to indulge in other

trappings of rank—set her apart from her peers. She was quickly branded a “rebel” within the organization,

because of her obvious disdain for what she regarded as the Service’s colonial culture. She thought it

ridiculous, for example, that training for new IAS members included lessons in etiquette from an out-dated

British civil servant’s handbook. Once, in 1969, when assigned to escort the President’s wife on a shopping

excursion, Aruna arrived in a simple cotton sari, prompting her companion to ask: “Why are you dressed

like that? Are you a Gandhian?” Aruna smiled wryly and said she just preferred wearing handloom cottons. 4

2 Ibid.

3 Personal interview with Aruna Roy conducted at the Harvard Kennedy School by Archon Fung, Pamela Varley, and Kenneth Winston, March 31, 2008. With minor editing, all quotations from Aruna Roy are drawn from this interview unless otherwise noted. 4 Rajni Bakshi, Bapu Kuti: Journeys in Rediscovery of Gandhi (New Delhi: Penguin, 1998), p. 28.


Aruna had joined the IAS believing it would enable her to work effectively for social justice within a

strictly legal framework. This reflected not only her interest in social development but her strong belief

that the Indian Constitution—if only it were implemented—was the right standard for measuring what

citizens were owed in the way of justice and equity. Though heartened to meet individual IAS colleagues

whom she genuinely esteemed, and who made a lasting impression on her of what it means to be a true

civil servant, she came to see the IAS as a hidebound institution that discouraged independent thinking,

especially on the part of a junior officer like herself.

I found … there is very little independence, because … every decision of yours is

overruled and, well, you can resist at your own level, but beyond that you can do

nothing, because there’s a system and it swallows you up…. You change your

mind as the political boss changes. So what you said yesterday was very good,

but today somebody else says it’s terrible…. I found it very difficult to take. It’s

simply not possible for me as a human being to compromise on my ethics. I’m

willing to compromise on opinions, it’s different, but not on ethics. It was very

difficult to lead a life where you were not worried every day as to whether you

were party to a decision … that would lead to people’s lives being damaged.

Although it was not necessary to collude with corrupt or unethical practices within the

bureaucracy, neither was it possible to fight against them, as Aruna saw it. Silence and inaction often

remained the only practical recourse for officers who wished to resist; otherwise, one was removed from

one’s post and shunted out.

The system of silent participation prompted Aruna to leave the IAS. As she puts it, “corruption is

not only graft; it’s also taking a decision which you think is not right, because of pressure…. Hierarchy

doesn’t allow for dissent and debate and doesn’t allow for contradictions.” After seven years in the IAS—

two years in training, five years in the field—Aruna decided to change paths. In 1974, at age twenty-eight,

she left in search of a less compromising way to pursue her vocation. Her understanding was that she was

not abandoning a career in development but leaving a place where following personal ethics was too

difficult.

To abandon this well-paid, prestigious bastion of the establishment was almost unheard of in India.

Combined with Aruna’s rejection of the privileges conferred by her upper class background, it reinforced

her image as a nonconformist and maverick. At the same time, Aruna’s family background and IAS

connections would remain a useful asset in her later work as a political activist. She would ever after be

known as an “ex-IAS officer,” an identity that lent her authority and insight into the workings of

government, especially rare among Indian grassroots activists. Whatever her life’s work would turn out to

be, her background and connections would give her lifetime access to a large network of educated and

influential people.


Discovering Rural India

On leaving the IAS, Aruna decided to join the Social Work Research Centre (SWRC), established two

years earlier by her husband, Bunker Roy, in the poor, rural village of Tilonia, about 100km from Jaipur, the

capital of the northwestern state of Rajasthan.

Aruna had met Sanjit “Bunker” Roy while studying at Delhi University. They married four years

earlier, in 1970, in a simple ceremony, shortly after Aruna had entered the IAS. Bunker also came from an

affluent and influential but unorthodox family. Two of his grandparents had worked for the (British) Indian

Civil Service, and one had become director general of the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization. They

belonged to a Bengali Brahmo family, early advocates of Hindu reform, and fought for women’s rights and

against caste- and religion-based inequality.

Bunker had gone through his own personal transformation in the mid-1960s. Once India’s number

one squash player, he had intended to join Grindlay’s Bank. But two and a half months of volunteer work in

a famine relief effort in Palamau in the state of Bihar (one of India’s poorest regions) changed his mind.

Witnessing the extreme deprivation and poverty in Bihar, and the government’s inept response to it,

Bunker decided to devote himself to doing something for the hungry poor in rural India. He set up SWRC in

1972, to further economic and social development in Tilonia, and recruited many people from first-rate

educational institutions in India to join him. Eventually, SWRC (now known as the Barefoot College) would

become one of India’s leading and most professional development organizations, known for its community-

based, participatory approach to decision making and its work in introducing solar electrification and other

technologies to semi-literate rural people, who learned to work sophisticated systems. Bunker built a

reputation as an authority on initiatives for rural development and was eventually named an advisor to the

Planning Commission of the Government of India. By the early 2000s, SWRC was especially active in water

and natural resource management, housing and infrastructure development, income generation, and

women’s empowerment, especially as barefoot solar engineers electrifying villages throughout the country.

Before marrying, Aruna and Bunker had agreed on the terms of their relationship, which were

unorthodox. They had agreed not to have children, not to be financially dependent on each other, and not

to impose their beliefs on each other. These conscious choices allowed them both to focus on their work.

About the marriage, Aruna would later say: “Though we haven’t worked together for years, it’s a good

marriage because in some ways it is not a marriage. We give each other space; it’s an equal relationship.”5

When Aruna joined SWRC in 1974, she spent time learning the ways of village life—and unlearning

her preconceived notions of it. Her own upbringing had been entirely urban, which meant: “I didn’t know

what a village was.”

6

5 Teena Baruah, “Conscience Keeper,” Harmony Magazine, December 2007, online at

This was by no means unusual. Although two thirds of India’s population was rural,

and although the cities were not far, geographically, from rural areas, city dwellers—especially those from

well-to-do families—tended to live in near-total ignorance of rural life. While Aruna’s IAS experience had

www.harmonyindia.org. 6 Ibid.

http://www.harmonyindia.org/


brought her in contact with villagers, her status as a government officer had constrained her understanding

of the realities of people’s lives. A key barrier was what Aruna describes as the “oppression of impatience,”

whereby busy officials fail to give sufficient time and space to people who come to them with their

problems. Even the best of IAS officers could not “permeate the unwritten code of rural India’s ethics on

who may, or may not, meet the officers.”7 She observes: After her years in the IAS, “I had to change from

talking to listening,” and “to learn that the IAS training I had been given, in being an instant expert, had to

be discarded if I wanted to understand the complexities of socio-economic change.”8

Moving to Tilonia also entailed a dramatic change in lifestyle. “We had no electricity, no running

water. Electricity was a far off dream. It’s now a little better, but not when I left the IAS. There was no

bank, there was no bus. I walked miles to get there.” One of her first challenges was to win acceptance

from the villagers.

When I first went to Tilonia, the women said, why do you come? Did we ask you

to come here? We don’t want to know your ideas about childrearing or

schooling. There’s the door. Bye, and see you later. We are busy. We have no

time for you. And that’s what’s great. For a moment I was very depressed. Then

I went back home and said: “Fantastic! They’re treating me as an equal.”

Aruna came to believe she could not succeed in empowering others if she was seen as someone in

a position of authority or as herself powerful.9

I had developed a personal preference for simple ascetic living. I felt that one

could not work with the poor unless one lived with them, as one of them. It was

important for me to share the lifestyle physically, too. It was important for me to

lead a life in harmony with myself, to see work and living as a continuum. This

kind of lifestyle facilitates a different kind of communication, where the people

see you as more accessible. Finally, when the people whom you work with see

the mutual dependencies for living and security, there is a much greater sense of

equality that permeates relationships.

She gradually transformed her lifestyle to conform to that of

the village:

10

Another early challenge was overcoming stereotypical notions of village life—whether the

romantic notion of earthen floors and terracotta handicraft, or the darkly simplistic view of a sexist, caste-

ridden, conservative society. Aruna realised that many notions about poverty and development held by

educated urban people were inadequate and questionable. An example was the Indian Ministry of Health

campaign, supported by the World Health Organization, to replace open kitchen fires with “smokeless

7 Aruna Roy, “Redefining Gurus,” available at www.mkssindia.org. 8 Kalaw-Tiroland, http://www.rmaf.org.ph/Awardees/Biography/BiographyRoyAru.htm. 9 Ibid. 10 Rajni Bakshi, p. 37.

http://www.mkssindia.org/



chulhas” (stoves) in poor neighborhoods. In many places in India, especially in rural areas, food was often

prepared over an open fire using firewood or similar fuel, inside the home kitchen. These were not a fire-

hazard, as homes were rarely constructed out of wood (a precious and costly fuel), but the open fires were

known to cause respiratory and eye diseases. A smokeless chulha, by contrast, vented smoke out of the

house through a chimney and thus prevented it from collecting inside.

After living in Tilonia for a time, Aruna could see that, while smokeless chulhas were not a bad idea,

they didn’t begin to address the most pressing needs of the villagers. The emphasis on smokeless stoves,

rather than access to basic services or means of income generation, was based on urban sensibilities, where

rural needs were misunderstood and priorities misplaced. People’s immediate need was not a more

sophisticated or more efficient method of cooking, but an end to oppressive unemployment and irregularity

in the payment of wages. Increasingly, Aruna began to question existing development policies.

Through learning and unlearning, “I really was educated—in processes, in methods, in human

relationships, in understanding women.”11 She began to appreciate skills and abilities far different from

those she had learned to prize during her own upbringing. She observes: “I cannot in this lifetime wield the

implements that manual laborers use, either to dig the earth or to shovel the earth. I can't carry the loads

of soil. That's extremely specialized. But they are called unskilled, and I am called skilled because I can

write with a pen. I cannot accept this.”12

They don’t need literacy from me…. This is something I know now that I’ve lived

for 40 years with them. Illiteracy is a skill handicap. It’s not a knowledge

handicap. It’s not an education handicap. It’s not a courage handicap. It’s not

an ethical handicap. It’s just a skill handicap, like when I go to China I won’t

understand Chinese. That doesn’t mean I don’t have the capacity to

comprehend and think. …it’s just that I need that part of it explained to me…. All

their other senses are very clear. In many ways I learn from them.

Aruna came to view literacy in the same way.

Aruna enjoyed aspects of her work at SWRC. She shared in household and organizational duties

and became involved with children’s education and income generation programs. But she gradually came

to question whether SWRC’s focus on economic self-sufficiency was an answer to grassroots empowerment.

As she saw it, SWRC had evolved into a community that considered itself apolitical—an alternative to

government, filling the space where government had failed to do its proper work. One limitation was that it

provided support only to the people directly involved in the development process. Another was that—

funded by national and international agencies including the Tata Trust, Oxfam, and Christian Aid—it

required a management structure that had to balance between project management and institution

building, leaving little space for public action. SWRC supported specific, local rural development initiatives.

While sometimes encouraging spontaneous action (it took a minimum wage case to the Supreme Court in

11 Kalaw-Tiroland, http://www.rmaf.org.ph/Awardees/Biography/BiographyRoyAru.htm. 12 Ibid.



1981 and won a landmark judgment), it did not focus on mobilizing people to confront government and

help the poor raise their voices against an apathetic administration. Increasingly, Aruna saw the need for a

political movement, generated within rural communities, able to operate without the distraction of meeting

grant specifications, profit margins, and the like.

Aruna attempted to raise these points within SWRC. When she encountered resistance to public

action and the choice of political work over development work, she decided to find a separate channel for

people’s empowerment in rural areas. In 1983, she left SWRC and, for the next four years, worked with

tribal and women’s groups across Rajasthan and neighboring states, exploring possibilities for collective

action.

A New Beginning

Aruna had, from the start, banked upon women as agents of change, and this conviction was

strongly reinforced by her many encounters with Rajasthani women, whom she found to be courageous

and savvy. During four years of travel and discussion, she developed a clearer understanding of how these

rural women view their own issues and challenges, and she built a support structure of people and agencies

prepared to work for systemic change.

Aruna also began looking for like-minded activists with whom she might work. She found such

allies in Shankar Singh, who had also been at SWRC, and Nikhil Dey, who was independently searching for

an activist group working for the rural poor. After following very different paths, the three met at SWRC

when Nikhil came to visit, and they discovered their common ambition to promote political empowerment.

Shankar Singh came from the small village of Lotiana in Rajasthan, where he and his mother

depended on a tiny piece of land for their subsistence. Like most people in rural areas, Shankar was

married while still a teenager. And like most people in his village, he barely earned enough from his land to

feed his family. So, like many before him, he left home to find employment in the city. He tried

Ahmedabad and then Baroda. He sold hot pakoras on the street, worked in a factory, then on a poultry

farm. Eleven years and seventeen jobs later, Shankar found himself at SWRC, wanting to delve deeper into

the problems of unemployment and poverty and to pursue his newly discovered talent for political comedy

and theatre. With his grassroots background, Shankar became a popular and effective educator and

organizer and was soon heading up SWRC’s communications team.

Nikhil Dey, like Aruna, belonged to the world outside rural Rajasthan. He grew up in New Delhi

and in Washington DC, where his father was an Air Commodore posted at the Indian Embassy. Rebelling

against his family’s privileged lifestyle, Nikhil nursed an ambition to work in India’s villages. As an

undergraduate at George Mason University in Virginia, he spoke out often about poverty in the developing

world, contrasting it with the careless affluence he saw in the United States—decrying, for instance, the

vast quantities of food thrown away in the college trash bins. Perhaps to underscore his growing


commitment to work as a social activist in rural India, Nikhil did the unthinkable and quit his studies before

the end of the last semester, arguing that a degree in the arts would not benefit him in his chosen field of

work. He returned to India, travelled across the country visiting various progressive groups, till finally one

day his conversations with Aruna and Shankar laid the foundations of a friendship that would determine his

future work and life.

Aruna, Shankar, and Nikhil soon recognized in one another their shared passion and began to think

about where they might go to make a start. All things equal, it might have made sense to go to Shankar’s

home village, where he had ties of long standing. But in his village, his beloved new vocation—

communicating political ideas through singing, dancing, acting, and puppetry—was unacceptable for a man

of his caste and background. (“’Those who are born into the performing castes must perform, and those

who aren’t must not,’ Shankar was told.”13

The house was a two-room mud-and-stone hut that had not been used for years and was in

disrepair. The new occupants decided to add another room for a kitchen and extra living space. Following

the traditional pattern, they constructed walls made of thin flat stones picked up in the nearby foothills.

The stones were piled up and held together with gravel and mud. A protective covering of mud was topped

off by a layer of fine clay mixed with cow dung and hay. The only unusual feature was a row of bamboo and

gulmohar saplings planted along one wall.

) So, the trio kept looking, until they got a lucky break. During a

visit to his family, Shankar met his cousin’s husband, Jait Singh, and began discussing his hopes and plans.

Jait Singh sympathized with Shankar’s ideas and proposed that Shankar and his colleagues move into his

empty hut in Devdungri, a small village in the Rajsamand district in central Rajasthan, at the northern end of

the Aravalli mountain range. (Devdungri is about 160km from Tilonia, or eight hours away by all available

means of transportation.) In 1987, the three activists, along with Shankar’s wife and children, began living

in Jait Singh’s house.

14

To begin their work, the group undertook a research study with a budget of Rs.30,000 secured

from the Ministry of Human Resource Development’s Department of Education, to examine issues related

to the participation of the poor in government poverty alleviation programs. From this sum, each adult

member of the household drew only the government-prescribed minimum wage for his or her work, which,

at the time, came to Rs.14 per day. For the next three years, the new family at Devdungri familiarized

themselves with their surroundings, while the people of Devdungri familiarized themselves with the new

unconventional family.

Empowering Laborers and Peasants

Aruna, Nikhil, and Shankar agreed they did not want to arrive in the village with a pre-set political

agenda or an ideology. They wanted to learn about local issues, by a natural process of working alongside

their new neighbors. 13 Rajni Bakshi, p. 33. 14 Ibid. p. 27.


The group found its first opportunity for political work in 1988, when they helped mobilize a

campaign in the nearby village of Sohangarh aimed at getting back a piece of communal land from a

powerful landlord. The dispute involved ownership of about 1500 acres. A throwback to the feudal era,

this politically well-connected landlord had staked a claim over the land in contravention of land-ceiling

laws promulgated after independence, which did not allow such a large plot to belong to a single family.

The landlord used threats and violence to discourage villagers from pressing their title to the village’s

common land.15

Aruna, Nikhil, and Shankar soon became involved in another struggle, this one among the people

of Devdungri and nearby villages to receive full wages from the government for famine relief work (in this

case, a project to dig up and move sand to reinforce a water tank).

In this situation, the activists’ experience would prove a boon. While powerful vested

interests had worked to circumvent the law, the three newcomers knew that legally the case was open-and-

shut. (Shankar, in particular, had a detailed understanding of land records, as his father was an important

revenue official in his village.) With the activists’ help, the villagers put their case to the sub-divisional

magistrate, whereupon—as, with trepidation and reluctance, they saw the rule of law prevail—the land was

given back to the village. Then, they set up a committee to decide how the communal property should be

used. With a grant from the Wastelands Development Board, the land was transformed into a lush green

swath, providing the villagers with necessary firewood, grazing land, and some employment. This success

resounded across the area. The Devdungri newcomers had demonstrated the power of non-violent

collective resistance—and established their own credibility.

16

This led the Devdungri team to organize a large-scale campaign, urging workers to refuse to accept

anything less than their full wages. A group of workers initially agreed to try this approach, but most felt

they could not afford to go without any wages for long. Only two stuck it out to the bitter end. Meantime,

protesters massed in front of the sub-divisional magistrate’s office in Bhim, and newspapers covered the

story. The tactics rattled local authorities and, eventually, a representative from the central government

visited the site and agreed that the minimum wage must be paid. Initial jubilation quickly gave way to

disappointment, when local officials abruptly reduced the minimum wage from Rs.11 to Rs.9. The two

workers who had insisted on their legal right to the full minimum wage did eventually win their case in

In this program, each of the 140

workers was supposed to receive a payment of Rs.11 per day, but most men actually received Rs.7 to Rs.8

and women Rs.5 or Rs.6, for their day’s work. In part, the underpayment was obscured by a confusing

system, in which it was unclear whether the workers were being paid at a piece rate (a set payment for a

given task) or a day rate (a set payment for a day’s work). Under neither scheme were they being paid the

legally required amount. When the activists got involved, they counseled the workers, as a first step, to

keep careful track of their completed tasks and hours worked so they would have a clear basis to demand

full pay under both systems. A local engineer on the project confirmed that the workers’ records were

correct, but they were still not paid what they were owed.

15 Ibid., pp. 37-39, 44-47. 16 Ibid., pp. 48-51.


court, but the decision was not treated as a class action, so it applied only to them. The campaign spread to

other famine relief work sites in the area but without producing any meaningful changes. All in all, it was a

disappointing outcome and led the group to re-examine its strategy. The time had come, they agreed, for

more visible protests and large-scale demonstrations, to develop a more effective platform for making the

voices of the villagers heard.

By the spring of 1990, a core group of activists and villagers had been mulling over the idea of

creating a new political advocacy organization, but they had hesitated, aware of the potential pitfalls. A

panoply of organizations already existed in India—charitable clubs, NGOs, corporate-sponsored

organizations—that all claimed to be helping the poor. According to Aruna, however, many of these were

corrupt, and so many others hamstrung by their need for funds or the agenda of their funders, that they

were regarded, as a group, with a fair degree of cynicism. Aruna and her companions did not want their

own political movement to be discredited by an easy assumption of corruption or conflict of interest, and

therefore were at pains to design an organization that was beyond ethical reproach. They also wanted to

maintain a simple, clear focus within the group. They therefore chose an identity and a name that clearly

signalled that the group was not an NGO or other similar entity. Instead, it was to be “a people’s

organization.”

On the 1st of May, 1990, about 1000 people came together in the small town of Bhim to form the

Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS)—i.e., organization (sangathan) for empowering (shakti) laborers

(mazdoor) and peasants (kisan)—to operate as a “non-party political organization,” aiming to bring about

the changes required for poor people to claim their rights through collective action. The political character

of the organization was explicit from the start. MKSS sought to provide the platform from which the poor

could make their voices heard, and to articulate the failures of the government in ensuring the provision of

basic necessities. The objective was “to use modes of struggle and constructive action to change the lives

of our primary constituents: the rural poor.”17

Crucially, the MKSS founders decided the organization would accept no funds from governments,

foreign or domestic; corporations; or large institutions. They would rely on small donations from

individuals and small organizations. (The group stuck with this policy even years later, when the

organization became internationally known.) On more than one occasion, entities like the Ford Foundation

offered support, but MKSS refused. The government of India offered support but was also refused.

Between these two sources, Aruna observes, “I see the Ford Foundation far more clearly. The Indian

government is my government, but the Ford Foundation—what interest would it have?” “We’re not that

rigid,” she adds.

In line with MKSS’s targeted beneficiaries (peasants and

laborers), the two primary issues taken up were land distribution and minimum wages.

17 Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey, “Fighting for the Right to Know in India,” available at www.righttoinformation.info.

http://www.righttoinformation.info/


When we travel for a meeting or conference, sometimes either the government

of India or Ford or other organization may pay our travel expenses…. It’s not that

they’re untouchables, but we will not get any funding from them institutionally. I

want to make this clear…. It’s again perception, and it’s also our politics, our

belief that struggles cannot be driven by funding…. In India, we have NGOs,

many of which are donor-driven, and we have people’s movements…. People’s

movements are kind of the bridge between the political parties, which have

failed to deliver, on the one hand, and the development process, which has

ignored people, on the other.”

The key was preserving the independence of the organization and avoiding any chances of taking a wrong

direction.

The governance structure of MKSS borrowed a page from the collectivist spirit of the women’s

movement: it was non-hierarchical. “The most important thing,” according to Aruna, “is equality….

Respect each other, then you can do anything with anybody, and they can do anything with me. It is not a

hierarchical relationship that brings about change—that is what I firmly believe.” Instead of the traditional

pyramid, a more apt image, she suggests, is a set of concentric circles, with each circle signifying a different

type of support. At the core were about fifteen to twenty full-time workers who administered the

organization day to day, accepting minimum wages for their work. These full-time workers, one might say,

were the leaders, but they were not the only decision makers; a group of about forty committed members

who had been with the organization for a long time joined in on any important deliberations. This group

was then surrounded by a base of rural and urban members, perhaps 6000 to 8000 individuals, who

supported the activities of the organization. (Support was not necessarily monetary. If there was an

agitation, members might bring vegetables or grain for the protestors.) Another circle of support was

constituted by sympathetic individuals from government, civil society, and academia.

To maintain its fluid character, MKSS was not registered either as a society or as a trade union.

There was no formal constitution and no membership fee. Membership was determined by participation.

When major decisions needed to be made, MKSS held an open meeting, run by a rotation of leaders, while

“all the literate members take turns keeping the minutes.”18

For MKSS, structured as a “non-competitive pool of complementary skills and talents,” ethics was

very important. “If you become a large bureaucracy,” Aruna observes, “you’re dealing with your own

personal ethics almost all the time, because you’re spread out and somebody will do something….

Sometimes we have had to ask people to leave the organization, some of our own colleagues. After they’ve

done something wrong, we just say to them it’s better if we part company…. So we decided to stay very

small.”

At the end—often after days of ferocious

debate—the core members voted.

18 Kalaw-Tiroland, http://www.rmaf.org.ph/Awardees/Biography/BiographyRoyAru.htm.



Philosophy and Style of Work

The philosophy of MKSS was also rooted in Gandhian thought and the idea of struggle against

oppressive power structures. For MKSS, this struggle was against a government that, while Indian in form,

had (in Aruna’s view) assumed the opaqueness and disregard for its people characteristic of an alien regime.

“India is, I think, a very good democracy in many ways, because it gives us a lot of space to struggle, fight,

dissent.” While the government had methods for curtailing people’s freedom, “all it can do ultimately is

put us in jail. And we’re willing to go, because for us in India, ever since the national movement for

independence and Mahatma Gandhi, going to jail for a cause has never been a source of shame or

embarrassment. In fact, it’s seen as an act of sacrifice or glory.” Aruna observes:

I think we’re Gandhian socialists. That is how Indians view us … they’d say both

things …. They’d say we’re Gandhians. They’d also say we’re socialists, because

we talk about equality; we talk about equal opportunities; we talk about no

differentiation on the basis of religion or caste or community. We talk about

gender equality. But, as strongly, we talk about simplicity of living and about

ethics.

Living simply was a time-honored tradition in India, going back before Gandhi, “so there is a social

acceptance of somebody who does that. There are no questions asked.”

Over the years, MKSS has used various Gandhian techniques, such as fasting, non-violent dharnas

(sit-ins), and other forms of civil disobedience. Such techniques of protest helped mobilize large numbers

of participants and brought to the fore the widespread discontent among people. But MKSS also

modulated these techniques in certain ways. Soon after the formation of MKSS, for instance, they

organized a hunger-strike for payment of full wages. The event was successful and gained a lot of popular

support. But after several hunger strikes, core MKSS members found it increasingly difficult to watch their

friends and relatives suffer through the early stages of starvation. The organization debated the issue and

decided to use sit-ins as their primary means of protest, and to reserve hunger-strikes only for situations of

dire urgency, where the protestors would have strong moral authority over the administration. Aruna says:

We are a very strongly ethical organization. Our internal ethics are as important

to us as our struggle for an ethical public domain. And that’s why means and

ends, as Gandhi would have said, are very important to us. Gandhi was an

example of a political leader in India who really did not compromise with his

principles even in public life, and if he did, he publicly apologized for it.

The efforts of MKSS rested on a firm commitment to the basic framework of democratic

governance. Aruna and Nikhil point out that, while elites have a voice under any system of government, it


is only under a democratic system that the impoverished have space to express themselves.19 The focus of

MKSS’s work was therefore to clear this space for use and make it an effective channel of change. It

strengthened the existing system, rather than searching for alternatives. Using the Constitution as their

measure to determine what justice and freedom require gave legitimacy to the MKSS campaign and helped

it avoid the appearance of other marginal organizations. In this way, they were able to counter labels like

“Marxist” and “Naxalite,”20

which were initially applied to MKSS. Regarding the Constitution as the legal

framework for providing social justice, of course, was what had initially compelled Aruna to join the IAS, but

in MKSS she found a structure that enabled her to work with a collective that shared the same commitment

and focus. [Exhibit 1 shows Aruna speaking to a group of villagers.]

The Initial Years

Once created, MKSS at first continued to focus its efforts on persuading the Rajasthan state

government to pay fair wages on its own government-sponsored work projects. The government was the

largest employer of unskilled labor, in its various development and famine relief programs. As the MKSS

activists pursued the wage issue over time, however, they discovered a series of “disconnects” between

government records and the realities on the ground. In some cases, records indicated that a work project

had been completed when it had not. In others, companies that supposedly received government contracts

turned out to be nonexistent.

The more they learned, the more the activists began to see the need to demand access to

government records. Sometime in 1991, a core group of about a dozen MKSS members—including Aruna,

Shankar, and Nikhil—got together to talk about strategy. They realized that the issue for poor people was

not just the payment of fair wages but access to correct information about government programs. “What

came out of the discussion,” Aruna reports, “was that now we must insist that all those muster rolls must

be made transparent, all the records must be made transparent, because if they are not made transparent,

we would never be able to prove, for example, that we worked those eight hours…”

Thus, whenever protesting unfair wage practices, MKSS began to request the relevant government

records. This proved an uphill battle. The decision to grant or refuse a request to see a particular

government record was generally left to the discretion of the public officials in charge of them. Many such

officials flatly refused to release their records, leaning heavily on a broad interpretation of the Official

Secrets Act of 1889, as amended in 1923. This Act was India's anti-espionage legislation, held over from

British colonization. Its principal aim had been to prohibit any action that would help an enemy state

against India, which included communicating a sketch, plan, or model of restricted government sites. To

approach, inspect, or even pass over (by air) any such site was a violation of official secrets. This archaic law

19 Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey, “Fighting for the Right to Know in India,” available at www.righttoinformation.info. 20 The Naxalites are a controversial leftist group working for reform but associated with violent struggles.

http://www.righttoinformation.info/


had been invoked, with a sweeping interpretation of its scope, by the bureaucracy to refuse access to

documents relating to many ordinary activities, including information about development and relief

program sites. The MKSS activists regarded this use as blatantly self-serving—a flagrant effort by the

bureaucracy to avoid public scrutiny and accountability. In asking for the Secrets Act to be set aside, Aruna

acknowledges, they were “asking for the entire regimen of the mind of the civil service to be set aside.”

Though mostly unsuccessful in persuading officials to release records to the public, MKSS did score

a few victories. Aruna describes a crucial breakthrough when a sympathetic government official allowed

her and her colleagues to view some government documents. They went to a local official in a village

where minimum wages were not being paid and asked him to conduct an inquiry. “He looked at the

records and found false names on the muster roll; there were ghost names on the muster roll.” During this

process, Nikhil and Shankar looked over his shoulder. On the roll, a company was listed that turned out to

be nonexistent. “It existed only on paper, having been set up by the block development officer and his wife

or somebody else’s wife….” They had drained the budget and had not supplied anything. “They said they

had supplied cement; no cement was supplied. Supplied bricks; no bricks were supplied. Whenever they

wanted money … they signed a few vouchers and made out a check to themselves, and they put the money

in the bank.”

At that point, the activists began to realize there was a vast paper fiction—reams and reams of

falsified documents that provided a cover for embezzlement of federal funds. Using this information, MKSS

was able to bring people’s attention to the improper channeling of their money. This was sufficient to

generate considerable wrath and protest, and marked a turning point for MKSS in focusing the movement

on the demand for records and accountability. “What was a real affront to most people,” Aruna remarks,

“was the audacity of it … right under our noses. And then, of course, if your money has been defrauded,

you’re so angry, because it’s an injustice.” The question, “Where are the accounts and how did you spend

my money?” was a personal question but also a social and political question. “Everything was implicit in

that one question of what have you done with my money, or how dare you put my fingerprint on the rolls,

or who was it who signed on my behalf?… So you get that kind of social anger, which is very necessary for

public participation.”

Another crucial moment came in 1994, when a worker from the village of Kot Kirana in the Pali

district of Rajasthan complained that he was being denied his wages.

We went to the block office, and in that block office there was an acting block

development officer who was actually an IAS officer, under training, and we had

met him—Shankar, Nikhil, and I had met him—when he was a trainee at the IAS

training school. (We are invited periodically, even now, to go and lecture to the

students.) … He said, ‘OK, you have a look, but I can’t give you copies. You can

copy by hand.’ So Shankar sat with the muster roll, which is a huge document….

He copied meticulously … and the entire staff was extremely agitated. This


fellow probably didn’t know quite what he was doing or was carried away. He let

us copy everything. So with these copies and pencils, Shankar went, and we all

went, individual to individual, and we said this is what it says. Well, all hell broke

loose, because there were dead people’s names on the muster rolls, and there

were fraudulent bills and all kinds of things. And so they all got really angry, and

they said we’ll protest against this. So on the 2nd of December, 1994, we had the

first public hearing in this village.

This was the first “jan sunwai” (people’s hearing). Aruna explains:

There isn’t much infrastructure. It’s an open tent, nothing much but tables and

chairs. But there was a mike, and they came and person after person testified

and broke the wall of fear. It’s very poor people testifying who can be beaten up

the next day, but you know … the middle class of the village was also very angry,

because this is infrastructure we’re talking about. So cheating also means their

roads don’t get built … their hospitals don’t get built. The school buildings

collapse on their heads. So they, too, were very angry and … they said we’ll

protect you. You just testify.

One of the few ground rules was that no one was allowed to speak on behalf of a political party or

caste group. The hearing was to remain focused on local grievances. Thus, the jan sunwai offered a

platform for questioning and debate and—ultimately—the demand for transparency and accountability.

Five more jan sunwais, drawing from 500 to 1,500 people, were held between December 1994 and April

1995, all regarded as highly successful in exposing previously concealed political corruption—health centers,

schools, public toilets paid for but never constructed; “improvements” to wells and roads that remained

unimproved; famine and drought relief that had never been delivered.21

But MKSS was on a roll, and the shutdown only fuelled the campaign. This led to two significant

developments. First, there was a demand to include jan sunwais within the system of local governance,

called the Panchayati Raj.

At that point, the government

stepped in and closed them down.

22

The campaign was formally launched in Beawar, a small town in the center of Rajasthan, with a six-

week dharna (sit-down protest rally) by a group of 200 to 300 villagers, in April-May, 1996. The dharna

The idea was to institutionalize these hearings as a form of social audit of local

power. This became a reality with the Panchayati Raj Act of 2000. Second, MKSS decided to initiate a

general campaign to demand legislation to protect people’s right to information from the government, as

long as it was not deemed a threat to state security.

21 Teena Baruah, “Conscience Keeper,” Harmony Magazine, December 2007, online at www.harmonyindia.org. 22 Panchayati Raj refers to a system of decentralized governance that grants villages considerable control over local affairs.

http://www.harmonyindia.org/


focused on the right to obtain photocopies of local government records. These protests drew special

attention because of their unique use of singing, puppetry, and street theatre. Observers were struck by

the fact that the villagers were not making the familiar demands for food or shelter or wages or jobs—they

were demanding photocopies!23

The protest site was also chosen as the venue for the birthday celebration of Dr. Babasaheb

Ambedkar, an Indian nationalist, jurist, and political leader from the dalit (untouchable) community, who

was the chief architect of the Indian Constitution. While the MKSS demonstration, on its own, might not

have drawn official attention, Dr. Ambedkar’s prominence necessitated the attendance of the sub-divisional

magistrate, who found himself sharing a podium with Aruna Roy.

Local peasants contributed food and services to the protesting group.

Sign-painters contributed banners. Poets contributed poems.

When the major trade unions of Beawar decided to hold their annual May 1st celebrations at the

site of the protest, as well, the national press arrived and the MKSS campaign was suddenly catapulted to a

national event. Following strong media attention and astute networking by MKSS with other civil society

groups, the sit-in was sustained for forty days. An astonishing 400 organizations pledged support to the

campaign for a right to information. In the end, many eminent people from civil society, academia, unions,

the media, and government created a cascading effect that turned the right to information into a national

call.

Going National

While it began in certain isolated localities in Rajasthan, with a special focus on employment and

wage issues, the struggle for information soon broadened in scope and content to encompass all areas of

government activity. The principal target became the restrictive law, the Official Secrets Act, and its use to

prohibit the dissemination of information. The aim was to break the nexus between vested interests,

elected representatives, and the bureaucracy.

To coordinate these efforts, the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI) was

launched. The founding members included social activists, journalists, lawyers, retired civil servants,

academics, and others who were capable of bridging the gap between grassroots activism and public policy

formulation. Through intensive consultations—and crucial help, first, from the National Academy of

Administration, where Aruna had trained to be an IAS officer, and then from the Press Council of India,

headed by former Supreme Court Justice P. B. Savant—the NCPRI drafted the first model Right to

Information (RTI) Law in 1996. Beginning with a campaign in Tamil Nadu, RTI Laws were soon enacted in

23 Rajni Bakshi, p. 77.


nine Indian states.24

Reflecting on this achievement, Aruna observes:

The national Right to Information Act was finally passed on the 15th of June 2005 and

took effect on the 13th of October.

In establishing the irrefutable connection between means and ends, and in

demonstrating a practical means of putting ethics into practice in democratic

governance, the RTI Law has brought back to some extent the values of

Mahatma Gandhi and his determination to keep ethics central to politics…. It

strengthened our faith, in the midst of violence born of inequality and justice,

that it may indeed be possible to use non-violent methods, democratic protest

and civil disobedience to get the democratic State to respond.25

At the same time, the achievement is not self-perpetuating. Values in public life are precarious

and need constant attention and re-affirmation. To reinforce this observation, Aruna tells the following

story.

26

A man was crushing oil seeds with a pair of bullocks. He was going round and

round with the bullocks and singing a song, which greatly irritated his wife. She

said to him: “I’m damn tired of this song, so please stop singing.” He replied that

the song and crushing the oil seeds are linked. She replied “Rubbish! I’ll do it;

you get off the stone.” And she went round and round, and after the fifth round

she started singing.

Aruna comments:

I think there are some things that go together. When you rule or when you

occupy positions of power, or when you become officers of justice or officers of

anything, or you officiate for anything, then without accountability there will be

corruption. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. That being the case it doesn’t

matter who occupies the chair, today X, tomorrow Y. Changing the individuals

who occupy the chair brings only limited, short-term results. The corruption will

return. For instance, there is a general belief, which we all shared, that women

in power will not be corrupt. But some years into the business of governance, lo

and behold the women are corrupt, too…. Two of our chief ministers were

24 Tamil Nadu (1997), Goa (1997), Rajasthan (2000), Karnataka (2000), Delhi (2001), Maharashtra (2002), Assam (2002), Madhya Pradesh (2003), and Jammu and Kashmir (2004). 25 From a presentation at the 20th Anniversary celebration by the Harvard Kennedy School, Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation, April 1, 2008, in Cambridge, MA. 26 From an informal talk on April 2, 2008, at the HKS Hauser Center. The second paragraph is from the same talk, and the final quoted paragraph from the interview on March 31, 2008.


women and very corrupt. So you can’t say it is a condition peculiar to a category,

whether gender or class.

I personally feel, having been both in the civil service and outside, that there is

no such thing as an intrinsically honest human being. So you need public

vigilance always, and it doesn’t have to be the MKSS…. In any democracy, there

will have to be public vigilance. It’s a responsibility that I take on when I vote,

that I will monitor—something, not everything—but some part of the system I’ll

have to monitor. If we disown the obligation to monitor … if we don’t monitor

periodically … you cannot contain corruption in government.

A Life’s Work as a Catalyst

In 2000, Aruna received the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, “for

empowering villagers to claim what is rightfully theirs by exercising people’s right to information.” She

requested that the award be given to MKSS, but when informed that it was given only to individuals, she

put the money into a trust (run by non-MKSS trustees) to support democratic struggles in India.

The momentous act of people from the grassroots collaborating to pass a law to ensure better

governance and transparency was reminiscent in many ways of the freedom struggle in India. The

campaign for the right to information, generated from the collective strength primarily of the poor and

women from rural areas, went against the conventional wisdom that the poor and the illiterate were weak,

and that formal education was necessary to make changes in a governance system. “Governance is not

only the concern of a few people,” Aruna says.

Governance in a democracy is everybody’s concern. So, in a small way, MKSS

only takes responsibility for sharing its understanding and its learning with

everybody…. It’s my government, and it’s a democracy. I’m a member of that

system. I vote people to power. So they’re not enemies. But at the same time …

the relationship of accountability has to be established—that I’m an equal and

that the system treats me as an equal. And in that negotiation and establishing

those relationships, I think MKSS is very important, because it provides us with

tools to forge those relationships. Only when we are responsible and

accountable can we evolve an ethical system of governance.

Despite her achievements, Aruna demurs when outsiders call her a leader. “I saw my role as that

of the initiator. I was a ‘catalyst,’ an ‘agent for change,’ the one who ‘intervened for change.’”27

27 Rajni Bakshi, p. 36.

As a


catalyst, she explains, she was able to channel the natural leadership of the people themselves, especially

women, who understood their problems and knew what was needed to resolve them.


Exhibit 1


Exhibit 2

Aruna Roy and the Birth of a People's Movement in India-1

Documents

Transcript of Aruna Roy and the Birth of a People's Movement in India-1