Arvind Kejriwal is one of India’s foremost champions of the Right to Information. Awarded the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership in 2006, Arvind has won a number of awards for his pioneering work in India. As noted on the Ashoka Foundation site,
Arvind uses a 2001 law called the Right to Information Act (RTIA) to bring political power back to the people of India. The law began in Delhi, and has since spread to eight other states, opening opportunities for citizens to hold their governments accountable to high standards of transparency and integrity. Through his organization Parivartan, Arvind raises awareness of the Act and trains citizen groups to use the law to check corruption. He leverages a growing volume of success stories to demonstrate that direct engagement in local government can make a real difference in people’s lives.
It is this last point, of story-telling, that comes out clearly in this interview. Arvind does not rely on hard statistics or cold reports. He highlights the need for and benefits accrued from right to information legislation through simple stories that are funny, moving and compelling. These stories resonate far beyond India’s borders. In this interview, I ask Arvind for ideas on how to bring about right to information legislation in Sri Lanka, which during war completely off the radar of the Rajapaksa regime.
And while it was reported in the Sunday Times that a new draft freedom of information act will be presented to the President, the prima facie description of it suggests that it will egregiously fall short of international standards and perversely, instead of meaningfully empowering citizens, give government even more control over the information released to the public. It is also likely that the new act does not incorporate the concerns of the Editors Guild over the draft freedom of information act in 2001.
Arvind’s experience, submissions for the enactment of a meaningful right to information law and the empowerment of citizens to use it to hold government accountable, is particularly resonant in this context.