From Jan Sunwai to Rajasthan Right to Hearing Act 2012: Fostering Transparency and Accountability through Citizen Engagement

Introduction

This study unpacks the evolution of the movement for transparency in Rajasthan since the promulgation of the Right to Information Act (RTI, India, 2005), which is now recognized as a piece of ground-breaking legislation comparable to its peers anywhere in the world. Information indeed is power, and if the RTI Act empowered the citizens, the next challenge was to effectively employ the information procured by the citizens for redressing their grievances at the source of the problem. Redressing grievances through a guaranteed delivery of public services and ensuring that the citizens’ grievances were heard at the source were the emergent challenges. These emergent challenges were addressed by two legislations. Those legislations are the Rajasthan Guaranteed Delivery of Public Services Act (RGDPS, 2011) and the Right to Hearing Act (RTH, Rajasthan, 2012). The two acts are significant because these demonstrate that the movement for transparency has not lost its steam and rather it has evolved into a movement for the rights of the people to receive public services, redress their grievances and hold public officials accountable to the people.

Although there are numerous studies on the RTI Act and quite few on public service legislation, there are hardly any scholarly studies that link RTH with the movement for transparency, grievance redressal and accountability. This study aims to fill that research gap in a modest way. It does so by laying out the catalytic role of the Jan Sunwai or public hearing in the struggle for transparency and draws attention to how digital technology has transformed the manner in which the government is hearing the grievances of the people. The study begins with an analysis of the dynamics and significance of public hearings (Jan Sunwai) held in rural Rajasthan in the last decade of the twentieth century. It explains how Jan Sunwai acted as a trigger for the people’s movement for the right to information and then proceeds to outline the key elements of RGDPS and RTH. The core section of this study is a comparison of three legislations RTI, RGDPS and RTH. This comparison links the three legislations as part of a continuum. The continuum demonstrates that the movement for transparency has metamorphosed from a struggle for the right to information towards a struggle for grievance redressal and government accountability. Having elaborated on this continuum, the study concludes by considering the changing nature of civic engagement in the context of the emergence of a transactional polity with the intervention of digital technology.

Dynamics and Significance of the Jan Sunwai

The movement for the right to information in India may be traced to a series of Jan Sunwai (public hearings) held between December 1994 and April 1995 in five village panchayats of central Rajasthan. This particular model of the Jan Sunwai, which was pioneered by the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), eventually led to the formation of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI) in 1996. The NCPRI was the key coalition of civil society organizations that converted people’s demand for information into a legislative process leading up to the RTI Act of 2005 (Mishra, 2003, p. 3).

The idea of the Jan Sunwai emerged during the struggle for minimum wages on rural public works and famine relief programmes. Chunni Bai, one of the residents of the Talai village in Bhim tehsil of Rajsamand district, recalled that the labourers were never shown the muster rolls and were paid less than ₹4 or ₹5 for a day’s work. ³ Shankar Singh, a founding member of MKSS, explained that after repeated dharna and hunger strikes, they realized the importance of the paper trail in the fight against corruption. ⁴ The access to information became the first step in their struggle.

The struggle for the right to information began thus, when the people sought to know the information contained in the panchayat records despite resistance from the bureaucracy and the elected representatives. ⁵ The small amount of information in those panchayat records—accessed with much difficulty—was shared openly at the Jan Sunwai and verified by the people. Through the forum of the Jan Sunwai, and perhaps for the first time, the people conferred simultaneously with their elected representatives and the bureaucrats on matters related to expenditure on public works, as well as the delay in the payment of wages. The people’s review of the expenditure on the public works and welfare schemes was the practical actualization of the concept of social audit—the auditing by members of society. Those who conferred included the poor, landless, illiterate and those who were marginalized by caste and gender. Their perusal revealed gaps between the actual and the recorded expenditure, as well as ghost entries in muster rolls. These gaps pointed towards large-scale corruption in the execution of public works, and these explained why people were paid less than the minimum wage.

The meetings of the Jan Sunwai were public or open, where the grievances of the people were heard, registered and addressed transparently. It enabled the people, especially those at the grass-root level, to express their grievances individually, as well as collectively. In the absence of a robust, mediated platform for fostering dialogue between the government and the people, as well as for conscientizing the people of their rights, Jan Sunwai became an innovative tool for engaging people directly in matters affecting their livelihood. At the Jan Sunwai, people engaged with their elected representatives and administrators from the district to the block levels as direct stakeholders in the governance of their village panchayats. At times, even other officials such as junior engineers and the local school headmasters have participated in the Jan Sunwai. This mode of dialogue between the people and their elected representatives inspired trust in the people while demanding accountability from public servants in the implementation of welfare schemes. In return, the district and block level councillors gained first-hand information about the challenges faced in the implementation of these schemes. The presence of all the stakeholders at the Jan Sunwai created what James Manor described as horizontal and vertical accountability (Manor, 2014, p. 2). The elected representatives were made accountable to other elected members of the councils (horizontal accountability), as well as to ordinary citizens/village residents (downward vertical accountability).

As a result of the Jan Sunwai, certain officials returned the embezzled funds, unfinished projects were quickly completed and wage earners were paid their dues. These gains that marked the initial successes of the Jan Sunwai rested on the principle of restorative justice. Jan Sunwai was thus effective for generating a culture of public accountability. Notwithstanding, it is important to note that no one was put on trial and no judgement was handed out. The acts of restitution were out of a sense of voluntary moral obligation. However, the danger of such practices of enforcing justice was not lost on the people and the organizers of the Jan Sunwai, who did not desire to transform the public hearing process into ‘kangaroo courts’. Such a process of dispensing justice was unconstitutional and could be a ground for disruptive politics.

Jan Sunwai also altered the social dynamics of the village by empowering everyone to participate at the same forum including women, Dalits, the illiterate, village elite, elected representatives and officers of the state. Those who were marginalized by social categories of caste, class and gender were always faced with multiple obstacles in their attempts to participate in local governance (Guru, 2007). Their engagement with the State—the panchayat and bureaucratic machinery—was often limited to pleading, waiting and receiving. At the Jan Sunwai, people could exercise their right to freedom of expression, thus, translating a fundamental right from paper to practice. These hearings helped in mobilizing the people, motivating them to speak up, understanding their rights and demanding what was theirs (Mishra, 2003, pp. 37–38). They openly expressed their grievances, especially, the problems faced with respect to the delivery of important public services. Together, as people, they brainstormed actively for devising solutions that were acceptable to all concerned.

As a forum of citizen or civic engagement, people gained courage from each other at the Jan Sunwai. Certain members of the MKSS, especially, Norti Bai, Lal Singh, Narayan, Sushila, Kalu Ram and Balu Lal among others aided the people in routine administrative procedures, such as filling the employment pro forma, submitting housing applications, as well as testifying at the court of the subdivisional magistrate. These minor quotidian acts too were forms of civic engagement. Indeed, such acts stitched together the elements of the struggle for information. ⁶ This kind of assistance from civil society organizations had an important outcome. It reduced the villagers’ fear of failure in their struggle for rights, constructed a sense of solidarity among the people and conscientized them by building their ‘political capacity’ (Manor, 2014, p. 9). James Manor characterized ‘political capacity’ as a combination of ‘political awareness, connections, skills, and confidence’ that facilitated people’s participation in the decision-making process at the local level. Perhaps, this explains the success of Kalu, Narayan Singh, Tej Singh and Norti in winning sarpanch elections in their respective gram panchayats on a shoestring campaign budget of ₹1,000–1,500 (Roy & MKSS Collective, 2018, pp. 209–213).

Jan Sunwai was thus a microcosm of all the processes that facilitated direct engagement among people as citizens as well as between people and the decision makers (their elected representatives and the bureaucrats) at the level of the gram panchayat and development blocks. This emergent model of the Jan Sunwai provided a mechanism for conducting social audit that was tested and perfected over the years by the people in the context of different public works and welfare schemes, for example, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA, Section 17). ⁷ Manor credits the participatory and accountability features of the MNREGA (Jenkins & Manor, 2017, p. 5) with building and developing the people’s ‘political capacity’.

Such forms of engagement between the citizens and the administration at the local, state, and central government levels have been institutionalized in other legislations such as the RTI Act (India, 2005), Scheduled Tribes and other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act (India, 2006), the Guaranteed Delivery of Public Services Act (Rajasthan, 2011) and the RTH Act (Rajasthan, 2012). Open public hearings may have been a part of Indian village life since long, but the demonstrable efficiency of the Jan Sunwai since 1994—with the first Jan Sunwai organized at Kot Kirana Panchayat (Pali district, Rajasthan)—initiated the gradual process of institutionalizing social auditing. In the next section of this study, the efficacy of the Jan Sunwai as a forum for social auditing towards achieving public accountability is examined.

Jan Sunwai and Social Auditing

The Planning Commission of India defined social audit—in its report Social Audit: Gram Sabha and Panchayati Raj (2005)—as citizen-led auditing/verification of the expenditure incurred on a development scheme or programme for examining its impact upon the society. In the absence of an effective hitherto existing method of conducting social audit, Jan Sunwai as pioneered by MKSS became the mechanism of social audit in the gram panchayats of central Rajasthan. The origins of social audit as a concept and as a practice are separate, although related.

The social audit mechanism at a Jan Sunwai started with procuring and publicly sharing the information on public works and expenditure. This information was collated and perused or audited transparently in the presence of the villagers, civil society members, the elected representatives and bureaucrats at the panchayat and block levels. Such social auditing however generated resistance. Questions were raised over the legitimacy of civil society organizations and the people at large to audit public accounts, as well as the authenticity of oral evidence tendered by citizens over written government records. The rural people ‘were not considered’ equipped to combat corruption. Sushila, a member of the MKSS, recalled that at Beawar dharna, some visiting lawyers had ridiculed her and other women because they did not wear sarees and speak English like Aruna Roy. ⁸ It was implied that the villagers were incapable of understanding the significance of the right to information.

The MKSS prototype of social auditing at the Jan Sunwai differed from the government’s conceptualization of the social audit mechanism in an important sense. While social auditing at the Jan Sunwai was driven by the citizens, the government vision was initiated and controlled by officers of the state, and since recently by technologists. The Rajasthan government institutionalized social auditing in the form of the Jan Sunwai in various stages starting with the ward sabha and gram panchayat. ⁹ Social auditing was soon adapted and adopted by various government institutions in India. Most significantly, the institutionalization of social auditing under the MNREGA brought the ‘audit’ function from the parliament to the people’s courtyard (Kidambi & Yadav, 2015, p. 39).

There are other instances of social audit being institutionalized elsewhere in India. In 2006, Andhra Pradesh conducted social audit of the development works carried out under Andhra Pradesh Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. In 2009, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India constituted a task group under the chairmanship of Narendra Singh for framing the guidelines for social audit. The task group reinforced the CAG’s observation that social audits score better over the CAG audits in assessing and evaluating the performance of development schemes implemented through the panchayati raj institutions and urban local bodies (Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, 2010, p. 2). In a series of steps taken between 2010 and 2017, the CAG, along with inputs from implementing agencies and civil society, formalized a set of guidelines, methodologies and standard auditing procedures for conducting social audit of public works carried out under MNREGA. An open Jan Sunwai, where work registers, payment details and audit findings were read aloud and shared with the people became an integral component of the standard social audit procedure (Ministry of Rural Development, 2017, p. 16). In 2017, Meghalaya became the first state to legislate a Social Audit Act. This act mandated regular social audit of programmes under the area of rural and urban local governance, provided for greater functional legitimacy to civil society organizations and introduced the concept of concurrent audit.

The institutionalization of social auditing by adopting the core mechanism of the MKSS prototype of the Jan Sunwai required timely and unhindered access to public information, which would not have been possible without the RTI Act (2005). It is therefore necessary to revisit the context of the promulgation of the RTI Act, the resistance faced by the movement for transparency and the emergent challenges in the functioning of the RTI Act.

Right to Information Act (2005) and Beyond

Jan Sunwai (public hearings) held between December 1994 and April 1995 in the five village panchayats of central Rajasthan—Kot Kirana (Pali district), Bhim and Vijaypura (Rajsamand district), Jawaja (Ajmer district) and Thana (Bhilwara district)—were catalytic to the people’s movement for the right to information in India. The demand to access panchayat records was collectively articulated at these Jan Sunwai. The right to access information first appeared in the form of the Rajasthan Panchayati Raj Rules (1996), where sections from 321 to 328, titled ‘Inspection of records and grant of copies’, gave the residents in a gram panchayat the right to inspect and demand photocopies of the public expenditure. ¹⁰ Section 323 of the Panchayati Raj Rules instructed every gram panchayat to print and publish the details of construction works that had been sanctioned and executed in the previous 5 years, along with a break-up of the expenditure. Three public hearings or the Jan Sunwai were convened for implementing and testing the efficacy of these rules. Those public hearings revealed acts of corruption amounting to lakhs of rupees.

In the year 2000, the Rajasthan RTI Act was passed by the legislature. In the following year, a Jan Sunwai convened at Janawad village in Kumbhalgarh tehsil of Rajsamand district exposed corruption to the extent of approximately ₹70 lakhs. The graft was reported to the administration that ordered further investigation by the three-member Banna Lal Committee (2001), which submitted its report to the Rajasthan government, leading to the suspension of 13 local officers of the state. The ground-level inquiry conducted by the committee members also aided the institutionalization of the Jan Sunwai as a method of social audit in Rajasthan. It stressed the need for provisions such as the audit teams visiting people to verify their testimonies, rather than summoning them to block- or district-level courts.

In 2005, the RTI Act was enacted for providing greater and effective access to information to the citizens of India. This act substituted the Freedom of Information Act (2000). The RTI Act was more progressive, participatory and effective than its predecessor as it mandated a time-bound delivery of information, maximum disclosures, minimum exemptions, the ‘establishment of an appellate machinery with investigating powers to review decisions of the Public Information Officers’ (Right to Information Bill, 2005, p. 1) and penalties in case of failures to provide information as per the law. The RTI Act is one of the key defining elements of contemporary governance as it created a culture of transparency and paved the way for subsequent legislation for redressing grievances. It was a reaction against the culture of secrecy generated by a piece of colonial legislation in the form of the Official Secrets Act (1923). Before the enactment of the RTI Act, people had restricted access to official information including those related to disbursement of welfare funds, government expenditure, or for that matter, even the student examination scripts and the scorecards of exams conducted by a number of Indian universities. The students would be declared passed/failed without being informed of the areas, where they could improve.

Section 4(b) of the RTI Act (2005) called for suo motu disclosure of information by all the public authorities apart from those that were exempted under section 24 of the Act. Suo motu or proactive disclosure of information informed the people about government actions, thereby building trust and inviting them to participate in the governance process. This bridged the divide between the ruled and the ruling, between the government and the citizens. However effective and progressive the RTI Act may be, the change did not come without resistance.

Overcoming the Resistance to Transparency

Several governments at the union and state levels responded to the movement for transparency in accordance with their own conceptions of governance and the role of the people. Where the role of the state was conceptualized as that of a service provider, the demand for information to redress grievances was considered legitimate. But when public servants were sought to be held accountable, the opposition to the movement mounted. It was at this juncture that the MKSS, the NCPRI, along with the coalition of people’s movement for transparency, creatively manoeuvred the checks and balances among the three arms of the state (legislative, executive and judicial) for overcoming the resistance and successfully positing the people as the most important branch of the government. The movement’s most prominent slogan, ‘Hamara Paisa, Hamara Hisaab’, coined by Sushila reaffirms the centrality of citizens in a democracy. The people were the ultimate masters, and no (public) servant could tell the master, ‘this information is a secret and I will not give it to you.’ ¹¹

In the struggle for information, the MKSS members first took recourse to executive orders from sympathetic bureaucrats to access panchayat records. Later, it launched a sustained campaign that compelled the Government of Rajasthan led by the then Chief Minister Bhairon Singh Shekhawat of the Bharatiya Janata Party for granting the right to inspect and demand photocopies of panchayat records. This right was inferred from the provisions of the Rajasthan Panchayati Raj Rules (1996). The Government of Rajasthan responded to the people’s demand but not without delays and evasions. Yet, by persistent efforts, which included a 40-day dharna in Beawar and another 53-day dharna in Jaipur, arguably led the government to acquiesce. These efforts demonstrated the strength and efficacy of civil society organizations in Rajasthan. This persuaded political parties to collaborate with such organizations for garnering their support in an election year. Thus, in 1998, the Indian National Congress, which was then in the opposition, promised to enact a law on the right to information in its election manifesto, if voted to power. The Congress Party, which won the elections to the state legislature in 1999 and formed the government under the leadership of Ashok Gehlot as the chief minister, consequently ensured that the Rajasthan RTI Act (2000) was passed.

The passage of the bill was not without significant dragging of the feet, which was opposed by the relentless advocacy of the members of MKSS and the NCPRI, including that of veteran journalists Prabhash Joshi, Ajit Bhattacharjea and others. This engagement between the government and civil society opened a debate on the nature and means of accessing the information. Some of the issues of that debate were: should the right to information be exercised through an executive order or through legislation? If it were a piece of legislation, could it be enacted by the state government? Eventually, the NCPRI was invited to frame the draft law, which was presented before the assembly. The assembly however passed a diluted version of the act (Roy & MKSS Collective, 2018, pp. 198–202).

Around the same time, at the union level, the Government of India (formed by the United Front with support of the Congress Party) set up the H.D. Shourie Committee in response to the draft RTI law submitted by the NCPRI and Press Council of India. The committee suggested the Freedom of Information legislation. Those were the years of coalition governments, which were marked by political instability. As efforts to provide a stable government continued, both the Congress and the BJP promised transparency in governance. Thus, when the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by BJP formed the government in 1999, it drafted the Freedom of Information Bill and presented it before the parliament in July 2001. This bill was passed in December 2002 by the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha. It received the assent of the President on 06 January 2003 and was notified the next day (Roy & MKSS Collective, 2018, pp. 279–280). The passage of the Freedom of Information Bill into an act was made possible by the efforts of the NCPRI, which combined its pressure tactics with support received through judicial interventions. The Supreme Court had set the deadline of January 2003 for enacting the Freedom of Information Act. However, this Act did not come into force because it was not notified.

In 2004, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) led by the Indian National Congress came to power on the basis of a National Common Minimum Programme (NCMP). Among other elements, the NCMP promised to enact the National Employment Guarantee Act and ‘a more progressive, participatory, and meaningful Right to Information Act’ (Pande, 2014, p. 138). For realizing the agenda of the NCMP, the UPA government created the National Advisory Council (NAC). The presence of Aruna Roy and other members of civil society organizations in the NAC improved the prospects of a new Right to Information Act. The NCPRI members effectively intervened in the RTI discussions within NAC, and these were communicated to the government. Prashant Sharma has noted that ‘the importance being attached to the issue (the RTI Act) by Sonia Gandhi could not be ignored’ (Sharma, 2012, p. 109). In the words of Aruna Roy,

the non-comprising political will of Sonia Gandhi, chairperson NAC, [with] support from members—Jairam Ramesh, Jai Prakash Narain, N.C. Saxena, A.K. Shiva Kumar, Prof Hanumantha Rao and Jean Dreze—and the presence of a fairly powerful political lobby outside the government also helped push the law. (Roy & MKSS Collective, 2018, p. 317)

But there was significant opposition from the bureaucracy.

It has been argued by Suchi Pande that the ‘NAC became a key site to offset the counter-mobilization by the officers of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), who tried to dilute the legislation’ (Pande, 2014, p. 139). A regular argument against an open government, or ‘too much’ transparency, was that it would hinder the work of the public servants and delay decision-making. While a section of bureaucrats resisted the movement for transparency, there were many others—such as N.C. Saxena, Harsh Mander, K.B. Saxena to name a few—who supported the movement and saw in the right to information ‘their own liberation from being forced to go against the law because of the diktat, either from within the bureaucracy or from the political establishment’ (Roy & MKSS Collective, 2018, p. 315). Opposition to the movement for transparency also came from political parties.

The NCPRI therefore petitioned different political parties through its key members and sought legal opinion on different issues raised by the Department of Personnel and Training. The NCPRI deployed the strategy of employing the ‘legislature against the executive’, when a diluted RTI Bill was put before the Parliamentary Standing Committee, ‘which contained several Sonia Gandhi loyalists, including its chairperson, E.M.S. Nachiappan’ (Pande, 2014, p. 145). The members of NCPRI, especially Shekhar Singh, Nikhil Dey and Prashant Bhushan, among other RTI advocates, mobilized individuals and groups to depose before the Standing Committee, which introduced more than 150 amendments and thus restored the provisions of the original NAC draft.

Notwithstanding the opposition from various quarters, the movement for transparency appealed to individual crusaders, who responded through their own activism. For instance, Ram Jethmalani, the Minister for Urban Affairs and Employment in the NDA government, issued an office memorandum in 1998 that people could access the government records in his ministry, including the file notings, by paying a nominal charge. ¹² The order however did not come into effect after the cabinet secretariat sought the intervention of the prime minister for blocking the order (People’s Union for Civil Liberties [PUCL], 1999). Later, during the debate on the RTI Bill in 2004, Jethmalani reminded the Rajya Sabha that the bill fulfilled a long-overdue objective of the Indian Freedom Struggle for repealing the provisions of the Official Secrets Act (1923) (Sridhar, 2016). He also lauded the provisions of the bill, claiming that it was stronger than the American legislation that contained 13 exceptions as against 7 of the RTI (Gaur, 2006, p. 57). This is, in brief, the political context out of which emerged the RTI Act that came into force on 12 October 2005.

While the RTI Act certainly endowed the people with the right to information and initiated a new political culture of transparency, there were certain other challenges. The most immediate of those challenges was the question: what could the citizens accomplish with the information accessed? For many of the inhabitants of rural Rajasthan, the information accessed ought to immediately redress their grievances especially those matters pertaining to their livelihood. The redressal of citizens’ grievances and delivery of public services were the immediate challenges that needed to be overcome. The history of right to service legislations in India highlights how people’s right to time-bound delivery of public goods and services came to be recognized in Rajasthan through two legislations. Those were the RGDPS Act (2011) and the Rajasthan RTH Act (2012). Therefore, the key elements of these two legislations ought to be called-out. The key elements of each act are highlighted respectively in the next section and the subsequent one.

Information for Grievance Redressal: Rajasthan Guaranteed Delivery of Public Services Act (2011)

There was a time when the granting of public services to people was considered less of a citizen’s right and rather as a favour granted by the public official. This was because the laws governing delivery of services were administration-centric. If the citizens wanted a service, they had to queue up, wait, be patient and later be grateful that they finally received what was essentially meant for them. The senior public officials responsible for delivery of public services were not held accountable to the people for their actions because Articles 309–311 of the Constitution of India mandated that they were appointed at the pleasure of the appointing authority—the president of the republic or the governor of a state. The Indian Constitution did not entitle a person with the right to service, which put her at the mercy of public officials (Thulaseedharan, 2013, p. 60). A citizen could not file a writ petition before the judiciary for the delay suffered in receiving the benefits, and the administrative tribunals were ineffective because they had only recommendatory powers. However, in the last decade of the twentieth century, there occurred a change in perception towards public administration.

The pendulum shifted with the increasing acknowledgement that the government ought to serve the people and that the citizens were entitled to effective time-bound delivery of public goods and services. The Citizen’s Charter—adopted in United Kingdom in 1991—was adopted in India in 1997. The Reports of the House of Commons (2007–2008) pertaining to the right to service evolved from ‘When Citizens Complain’ to ‘User Involvement in Public Services’ to ‘Public Services: Putting People First’ (Thulaseedharan, 2013, p. 62). The focus thus shifted from Citizen’s Charter to Public Service Guarantees with emphasis on time-bound delivery of services and the creation of effective grievance-redressal mechanisms in order to put ‘people first’. With the adoption of the Citizen’s Charter in 1997, the central and state governments have been taking small steps towards an effective delivery of public services and inclusion of grievance-redressal mechanisms. Madhya Pradesh was the first state to pass the right to service legislation in the form of the Madhya Pradesh Lok Sevao ke Pradan ki Adhiniyam (2010). Nineteen other Indian states followed the suit (Agarwal, 2014, p. 9).

The RGDPS Act (2011) was aimed at ensuring a transparent and responsive administration with time-bound delivery of public services. The persons eligible to receive the benefits were entitled to receive those within the stipulated time limit as specified by particular public departments. The designated officer in each department could take necessary steps to provide the service. The departments were also directed to publish all the details pertaining to the service such as the stipulated time limit, the name of the designated officer, the First Appellate Authority and the Second Appellate Authority. In case of delay in the provision of services, the applicant could file a case with the First Appellate Authority, who may direct the designated officer to provide the service or deny the application on reasonable grounds. While the RGDPS mentioned the time period within which the service was to be provided, it did not provide a fixed time period within which the applicant’s grievances may be resolved. These limitations of the RGDPS were covered by the RTH Act that provided a single-window mechanism for filing and resolving grievances in a time-bound manner at the source itself. The provisions of that particular legislation, unique to Rajasthan, are elaborated in the section below.

Redressing Grievances at the Source: Right to Hearing Act (2012)

The Rajasthan RTH Act (2012) was enacted during the administration of the Indian National Congress. It aimed at ensuring that the grievances of citizens were heard by public officials at the source of the grievance itself so that these may be redressed effectively and in a time-bound manner at the nearest place possible (Rajasthan Right to Hearing Bill, 2012, p. 24). The act was based on the draft grievance-redressal law submitted by the Soochna evum Rozgar Abhiyan. The government of Rajasthan had however reduced the scope of the original draft considerably while retaining the provision for Jan Sunwai, which was a dialogical process. ¹³

The RTH Act (2012) allowed a person to submit an application seeking redressal for delay or failure in claiming any benefit or relief relating to any policy, programme or scheme run by the state government or the central government in Rajasthan or regarding any matter arising out of failure in the functioning of, or violation of any law, policy, order, programme or scheme in force in the state by a public authority.

Upon submitting an application, the applicant would be provided with a pink receipt containing the date of application and the date of hearing. The applicant/complainant was entitled to a hearing within the stipulated time period, normally 15 days, which was the duty of the public hearing officer. This first hearing was conducted at the panchayat/block level by the public officials. The format was similar to that of the Jan Sunwai, where the hearing of grievances was conducted transparently in front of everybody present at the hearing. All the officials of different departments in a panchayat samiti were expected to be present there and were able to directly hear the grievances of the people and provide rationale/resolution for the same. They could order an inquiry or initiate the process of resolution by issuing the appropriate orders. Taking proactive action, the state government instructed the district collectors and block development officers to organize right to hearing camps, popularly called the Jan Sunwai camps for spreading awareness about the legislation and encourage the people to use it.

The public nature of such hearings promoted resolution of grievances at the point of origin and in a transparent manner. The others present at the hearing gained the courage to speak up and were assured of a fair hearing by the administration. The collective complaints also acted as feedback to the administration on the bottlenecks and challenges faced in the implementation of different development programmes.

Rights to Information, Public Services and Hearing: A Continuum of Transparency Legislations

The RTI Act (2005) and the right to services legislation such as RGDPS Act (2011), and the RTH Act (2012) aim at transparency in political life and government accountability in a citizen-centric polity. As mentioned earlier, the RTI Act (2005) went against the grain of the Official Secrets Act (1923) and ushered in an era of government transparency. It has been effective indeed partly because it was read into Article 19 of the Indian Constitution. However, the RTI Act alone was insufficient for resolving people’s grievances.

Through the provision of the RTI Act, the citizens could know why a certain problem emerged, but they were yet to develop a mechanism by which they could resolve that problem. The RGDPS Act (2011) and RTH Act (Rajasthan, 2012) sought to remedy these limitations of the extant transparency legislation. But unlike RTI, the latter two legislations (RGDPS and RTH) were not linked to the Fundamental Rights of the Indian Constitution. Although RGDPS (2011) and RTH (Rajasthan, 2012) are as yet unattached to the Fundamental Rights, these legislations challenged the established understanding of the ‘Doctrine of Pleasure’ under the Articles 309–311 of the Constitution. These two legislations are transforming the administration-centric nature of the Indian polity into a citizen-centric one. If RTI informed the people, RGDPS recognized the duty of the government to provide for public services and RTH guaranteed that the citizens are heard by the government. This right to hearing as a practice may be traced back to the Jan Sunwai. Of late, however, the live orality of the Jan Sunwai is being substituted by digital technology in the domain of information sharing and grievance redressal.

From the Oral to the Digital: Jan Sunwai and Rajasthan Sampark

In 2015, an electronic grievance resolution portal named Rajasthan Sampark was launched, where by citizens could directly file their complaints online or at Citizen Contact Centres, track its status and even reopen it if they were not satisfied with the solutions. This digital portal has made the mechanism of grievance redressal accessible to people throughout the state. This digital project was designed to help the administration ‘focus on understanding the ground reality’ and viewed grievances as ‘opportunities for improvement’ (Rajasthan Sampark, 2014: About Us). The project directions for Rajasthan Sampark—the web and app based online grievance-redressal system—also included periodic Jan Sunwai at block and district levels, where the block officers listened to people’s individual and collective grievances. However, it often takes the form of people queuing up to fill grievance forms that would be later uploaded on the website.

The introduction of technology-driven e-governance systems has aided both citizen engagement and transparency. It is both individually accessible as well as scalable in nature. The Government of Rajasthan has digitized most of the welfare services and has placed all the relevant information with regard to beneficiaries, their payments, the status of development works and other details in the public domain. In fact, as the architects of MNREGA had stressed, the rural employment guarantee act is the most technology-driven programme with a robust information management system that displayed the records of the works and labourers across thousands of gram panchayats in the country.

While the advantages of technology are certainly recognized, this digital process could be critiqued as giving way to a transactional state instead of a participatory polity. It is a centralized process, where the focus is only on seamless service delivery. As the applications received under the RTH Act (2012) were also uploaded on Rajasthan Sampark, it was believed that there was consequently little need for public hearings. However, the absence of a free and open hearing has diluted the level of citizen engagement, as well as vertical accountability, which were fostered by the Jan Sunwai. There is as yet little scope for social auditing and making public servants accountable to the people. The sarpanch and ward panch no longer feel compelled to be accountable to the residents of their gram panchayat. The citizens were instead at the mercy of the district and block administrators thus reversing the effect of ‘democratic deepening’.

Nikhil Dey, of the MKSS, recounted that ‘between 2012 and 2014, there were provisions for wall paintings, changes in Panchayati Raj Rules, and so on, and civil society intervention played a major role. We also understood that even though we have achieved transparency, it is very important to achieve accountability to the people.’ ¹⁴ He further commented that, ‘the present government [led by the BJP] is a little negative on the issues of RTH. However, nobody can be completely negative because it is an Act. Moreover, it is a technocratic phase where the government wants to do everything electronically.’

The state is yet again made impersonal, this time behind computer monitors and virtual databases. The (online) records often enjoy greater credibility as compared to the individual/collective testimony of the people. The possibility of the on-ground verification is also diminished as has been revealed by multiple cases related to delivery of essential supplies, disbursement of pension fund and other similar instances. ¹⁵ Although Rajasthan Sampark has increased accessibility, it also aids the process of centralization. People were encouraged to call over the phone and were discouraged from coming to government offices for minimizing face-to-face interactions. Collectives were not encouraged under any circumstances.

The members of the MKSS, who worked with the government for the implementation of the RTH Act, have always insisted that there must be a public hearing platform in villages for sorting out grievances. Such hearings ought not to be one-on-one, rather these should take place openly, in the public sphere, and with the presence of all the officers. The government however responded by saying, ‘Yes we have understood, we have all the information, we will set everything right. In such a case, when the government mentions Jan Sunwai on their website, the usage is not bad, but it is not a Jan Sunwai. It is a misappropriation of language.’ ¹⁶

Is digital technology atomizing individual citizens and debilitating the kind of civic engagement that was singular to the Jan Sunwai? Are those characteristics of the Jan Sunwai now under erasure, whereby the citizens spoke up, engaged with each other as well as with the public officials who directly ‘faced’ the people? These criticisms of the digital technology do not however deny the possibility that the Jan Sunwai may be converted into a forum for a politics of disruption or incitement to violence rather than a space, where the citizens constructively engage with their government. Whether that space for civic engagement retains a live physical form or becomes completely digital, the mechanism of social auditing as was practised at the Jan Sunwai is now institutionalized.

Conclusion

This study examined the nature and functioning of the Jan Sunwai and explained the reasons for its efficacy as practised by the MKSS in rural Rajasthan during the decade of 1990s. The MKSS prototype of the Jan Sunwai was effective in at least three ways. First, the Jan Sunwai acted as a forum for empowering the people through the process of civic engagement, which included fostering a dialogue between the people and the state, as well as assisting the marginalized villagers in exercising their citizenship rights. Second, the Jan Sunwai triggered the people’s movement for transparency in government, which resulted in the promulgation of the RTI Act (2005). Third, the Jan Sunwai translated into actual practice the concept of social audit, which was present in the Rajasthan Panchayati Raj rules. Jan Sunwai as a forum for social audit has been so effective that social auditing has now been institutionalized in India at various levels.

For effectively conducting social audit, although, citizens required public information, which was guaranteed by the RTI Act (2005). While the RTI Act indubitably changed the nature of the Indian polity, one question still persisted since its promulgation in 2005: information, yes; but for what purpose? The purpose of procuring information by the citizens was for redressing their grievances, and preferably, at the source of the problem. In 2005, there was, as yet, neither a piece of legislation for redressing the grievances of the people nor a law that compelled the government to hear the views of the people. The RTI Act, although read into Article 19 of Part III of the Indian Constitution, was by itself insufficient to redress people’s grievances at the point of origin. In such a context, the efforts by the civil society organizations in Rajasthan yielded two legislative measures: the RGDPS Act (2011) and the RTH Act (Rajasthan, 2012). This study analysed the provisions of the two acts and argued that these form a continuum with the RTI Act of 2005. This analysis has arguably demonstrated that the people’s struggle for transparency has evolved into a movement for the people’s right to receive public services, redress their grievances, hold public officials accountable and the right of the people to be heard by the government. Together, these three acts are gradually altering the administration-centric nature of the Indian polity into a citizen-centric one. However, the exercise of the right to hearing through the earlier practice of live hearings, or Jan Sunwai, has now been replaced by digital technology. While it is indeed true that technology can redress grievances promptly and foster transparency in governance, it could also hinder the participatory element so characteristic of Jan Sunwai, if the citizens are not eternally vigilant of the use of technology.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.