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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Are we moving from merely being subjects to absolute citizens? by M Rajshekhar

Mai-baap. That is how poor Indians referred to the state ever since independence. The benign provider looking after its subjects like the rajas of yore. But, today, the people have started demanding accountability from the mai-baap.

Why? Because a clutch of new laws, like the Right To Information Act (RTI) and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), are moving the government's developmental promises beyond "the realm of a privilege that benevolent regimes might provide to their citizens to a right that could be 'legally enforced', claimed and asserted," to quote feminist scholar Srilatha Batliwala.

ET saw this approach at work while studying Mitanin—a community health worker programme in Chhattisgarh. One fine day in January, for instance, Savitri Sahu, a community health worker in Bastar, was awakened by the family of a woman who had gone into labour. She borrowed a tractor, took the expectant mother to the primary health centre, woke up the doctor and the nurses and got the delivery done.

The medical staff's presence in the vicinity was a recent improvement. Till a couple of years ago, the doctor lived in a nearby town, and travelled down to the health centre every day. Some days, he would come late. Other days, he would not come at all. And then, he began coming on time. Later, he moved closer to the rural clinic itself.

What explained this improvement? Sahu and her fellow Mitanins were trained by the government to regard healthcare as a right. As something the health bureaucracy had to provide. Armed with that certitude, they began referring patients to government clinics. Whenever villagers found the clinics locked, the Mitanins reported these abortive trips to block medical officers. Slowly, the doctors started coming on time.

Says Biraj Patnaik, a right-to-food activist involved in the conceptualisation of the Mitanin programme: "The right way to bring about a change is to place it in the rights framework. That makes people ask for services as a right, as opposed to waiting for something that the government doles out."

Internationally, this idea took shape during the late nineties after the chaos engendered by structural adjustment. It reached India during the run-up to the 2004 elections.

At that time, even as the BJP rolled out its India Shining campaign, reports of rural distress made the Congress feel that including welfarist policies for the rural poor in the manifesto could pay off electorally. As it was, the party's 2003 defeat in Rajasthan elections had strengthened those who argued for a strong manifesto.

This is how RTI and NREGA made their way into the 2004 manifesto. As electoral victories followed in 2004 and again in 2009, these were followed by the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, the Right to Education Bill and the Food Security Bill .

The question is: Have these Bills begun to change the relationship between the state and the people? Are we, as MKSS activist Nikhil Dey puts it, moving from being subjects to citizens?

Yes, but at a slow pace.

Take NREGA. Under the scheme, people can demand work. And if the state fails, it has to pay an unemployment allowance. But neither happens very often.

Earlier this year, planning commission member Mihir Shah told ET: "One of (NREGA's) failings is that people still think they will get work when the government gives them work. They don't realise that it is a right to demand work." Or take the Forest Rights Act. Recognition of rights continues to be fitful and slow. Or take RTI. Says RTI activist Arvind Kejriwal: "People are still struggling to get information. Penalties are not enforced."

What is going wrong? A part of the answer goes back to political will. As Kejriwal says, "It is not enough to give people entitlements. They also have to be empowered to get that entitlement."

RTI, says Dey, is powerful because of its clause on penalties. "It fixes accountability. A bureaucrat who doesn't provide information will be held accountable."

But, there is hope. RTI is bringing transparency into the functioning of other schemes. In part because it enables supervision. And in part because of a larger trend it seems to have catalysed in reducing the secrecy that used to shroud government programmes.

And isn't transparency a necessary requirement for accountability?

Finally, five years is a short time to learn to impose accountability on the Indian political and bureaucratic machinery. They are past masters. For now, these Bills have created spaces where citizens' relationship with the government can be renegotiated.