Tex by Saswati Chatterjee:
“Ek aisi chai jo corruption use karte hain, unko diabetes kar dengi.”
Translation: A tea which gives diabetes to whoever is corrupt.
Sounds amazing and impossible at the same time right? Well, it would be half right since while it’s amazing, it’s definitely not impossible.
We’re talking about the RTI or ‘Right to Information Act’, an act under which any Indian citizen can file a query for the nominal sum of Rs. 10 and ask public institutions to be accountable for their actions.
At this particular JoshTalk, K.M Yadav, the man BBC described as the one who ‘helped a village through uncomfortable questions’, talks about how he discovered the power of the RTI and how unknown it is to most Indians.
In fact, as Yadav himself puts it, in a survey he carried out, he found that 90% of people in rural India don’t even know anything about it! Yadav himself has filed the RTI more than 800 times, on behalf of other people and has forced the otherwise corrupt and slow moving bureaucratic machinery to respond.
In some cases, they have even finished the work they were supposed to do, in half the time. Now that is the power of the common man!
