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standing in lines day after day, running pillar to post in one office then another, nor does it mean bribing people from the secretary to the top officer to get your work done, it is the RTI ! From the first Asha/ AID workshop in 2006 that I attended at Princeton University with Sandeep Pandey, I remember hearing about the Right to Information Act (RTI), passed in 2005 by the Parliament of India to empower common people to participate in democracy. It is a simple measure to bring about accountability by making accessible the records of the Central and State Government. Any citizen of India can ask for information pertaining to any government activity like the status of road repair and building or providing electricity supply in a city or village, accounts of the expenditure incurred in any government activity, detailed account of why one hasn’t received their government issued documents like a passport, pension documents, a property document etc. According to the Act, information has been defined as any material in any form including records, documents, memos, e-mails, opinions, advice, press releases, circulars, orders, logbooks, contracts, reports, papers, samples, models, data material held in any electronic form and information relating to any private body which can be accessed by a public authority under any other law for the time being in force. The Act also requires every public authority to computerise their records for wide dissemination and to proactively publish certain categories of information so that the citizens need minimum recourse to request for information formally. It includes the right to: i. inspect works, documents, records. ii. take notes, extracts or certified copies of documents or records. iii. take certified samples of material. iv. obtain information in form of printouts, diskettes, floppies, tapes, video cassettes or in any other electronic mode or through printouts. Now even I, the common (wo)man knows what to do when I am stuck with a problem regarding government functioning. I have heard many success stories about RTI ( Parivartan’s website* has many stories and applications) and have always been eager to try out this tool. This time, when in India during the winter break, I got a chance to do so and jumped on it to check out the validity of the ‘power of the RTI’. My father had been trying to obtain our current home’s registration document for the last 14 years. The house became a home over the years, we grew up, the house has been painted and repainted… but every time my father went to claim the document, he was asked to wait for two hours and the person never found it, and he was subsequently asked to go to another office and the same story unfolded there. After 13 attempts at doing this, he resigned and continued residing at home without any official documents in hand. This time he told me, ‘You and your brother keep going on about RTI. Let’s see what it can do for this registration document. ‘So I set faithful Google to task with ‘RTI application’ and retrieved a couple of cases similar to mine. My brother, who had earlier made an RTI document but didn’t exactly need to submit it, provided copious tips for making the application. And the nice part is – there is no form or format for the application. It can be done on a normal sheet of paper, addressing the ‘Public Information Officer (PIO)’ of the office you have a grievance with. The PIO is generally the head of the office, so every office has to have a PIO by default. The important part is to write in the subject line of the letter, ‘Information Requested under the Right to Information Act 2005’ The letter I used is asked simple-to-answer-but-embarrassing-to-answer questions for authorities who may have not done their job properly. So the letter just makes them sit up, shake away their negligence and get to work on what they should be doing. Submitting the application to the PIO was not trivial because he was out for lunch on the day we went, so when my mother and I got back from our own lunch, there was no electricity in the office! Finally we got hold of the right people, who very reluctantly agreed to take the application, and we submitted it. And it worked! We have our registration document now! So bribes and long repeated waits in lines, adieu, in the new dawn of a strong people’s democracy through RTI ! RIT 23
Subhashini Dinesh subhashini.dinesh@gmail.com Sharmila’s eyes are bright, her face lighting up with her smile when her class teacher announced that there would be no class as the teacher had visitors. Her classmates request her to sing for them. She almost immediately obliges them with a Tamil folk song, while her “audience” break into a spontaneous dance. Eight-year-old Sharmila is the star singer in her class, effortlessly moving from foot-tapping folk songs to the melodious chartbusters. Her voice is ever so sweet and effervescent. It belies the long hours she puts in at the dingy handloom unit, deftly readying silk threads to be woven into sarees that enrich the cupboards of Indian women. Her mornings begin at 4.30 by force. Sleeping beyond that is a luxury her family cannot afford, specially in this wintry month of margazhi (December according to the English calendar) as it culminates into the marriage season of thai (beginning of January according to the English calendar) . Her family, indebted to the unscrupulous handloom owners, have loaned Sharmila for labouring in the unit in exchange for the loan. That is Sharmila; a bonded labourer in the mornings who tries to return to childhood in the evenings as a sprightly young student. Her smile will never remind anyone of the loss of childhood that our children seem to have taken for granted. Her classmate, Anbu, is seven and is also a bonded labourer in a weaving unit. So the classroom of 45 children are all Anbus and Sharmilas in the seven to twelve age group, trying to grapple with their imperfect present and a tense future. They all meet in the evenings at this school for child labourers in a Kanchipuram village, run by an NGO. Parents are reluctant to send their children to these schools, fearing distraction or rebellion from their wards. After all, these tiny fingers tediously separating silk threads and twining them to the handloom unit is the repayment for their deep debts. The children are not sure they will be able to come for class the next day. It is with this uncertainty that most night schools for child labourers function. But that was 3 years back. This year, the same place was desolate. There was no laughter, no children, and no classes. The NGO, which was conducting the night school, had to shut shop because there were no children to attend them. The government had banned child labour. So, officially, there was no employment of children, and hence there was ‘’no need for night schools’’. They were supposed to be attending day school like other children. A visit to a day school revealed that there were a few children of weavers who were out of their cramped handloom units, playing out in the sun, studying and making friends. An NGO had “rescued” them from their parents and helped them get back to school. Their families had also pledged to stop sending their children to the weaving units. But not all children had been enrolled. Then where is the surging hope that children will be empowered with education? The answer lies, not just with the NGOs who can help, in a small way, to help elevate the status of children. The answer lies with the government executing its literacy mission programme in right earnest. The children working under such hazardous conditions must first be identified and then enrolled into schools or placed under vocational training. Most importantly, the families of such children must be given sustainable income generating opportunities so that they do not prevent their children from going to school. But are these far-fetched dreams? Can children trapped in the throes of misery be granted their fundamental right to education? Creating awareness and mobilizing support for these causes may be the first step. And that first step is the most crucial step in driving out darkness from these childrens’ lives. 24 Warped and Wafted Lives of Children
Page 2 and 3: Spring 2009 Contents 2 Foreword Edi
Page 4 and 5: Mekala Krishnan Manisha Bhattachary
Page 6 and 7: Known as the most authentic Indian
Page 8 and 9: Chethan Sarabu crs49@cornell.edu Th
Page 10 and 11: -The main objective of ISW is to pr
Page 12 and 13: Alaka M. Basu ab54@cornell.edu The
Page 14 and 15: information. Their residence(huts)
Page 16 and 17: Rajendran Narayanan rn63@cornell.ed
Page 18 and 19: instruction materials very often co
Page 20 and 21: Paulami Chatterjee chatterjee.paula
Page 22 and 23: school in the area. It has at prese
Page 26 and 27: Project Stewards: Rajendran Narayan
Page 28 and 29: Swapnaa Jayaraman I don’t know ab
Page 30: Ithaca Guitar Works 215 N. Cayuga S

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