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Home > City Buzz > Happenings Magsaysay winner Aruna Roy gives talk at Stanford http://planetguru.com/Articles/ArticleDetail.aspx?ChannelId=Happenings&ArticleId=7751 Print this page Email this page   The activist in Magsaysay Award winner Aruna Roy, a bureaucrat-turned-political-crusader, was in full evidence as she passionately spoke of her mission to empower the Indian people with the right to information, in front of an august audience of some 70 people at Stanford University on Oct. 25. The late evening talk attended by people, professors, students and several others was organized by several Bay area organizations including Praja Net, Sanskriti (Stanford), A.I.D and supported by several others like India Literacy Project (ILP), India Relief and Education Foundation (IREF) etc. Taking off from her pet campaign of right to information in India, Roy spoke about various maladies plaguing India, as she stood against a backdrop of banners painted with slogans, such as “Corruption is Injustice — Silence is Consent”. Roy was very critical of the Indian bureaucracy of which she was once a part but quit to join Social Work & Research Center (SWC), an NGO in Rajasthan. According to her, the bureaucracy “essentially exists to maintain status quo”. She said she veered towards political activism, as other means of effecting a fundamental change did not work out. She said she had been able to show to the drought-stricken rural folk of Rajasthan how information could give them power — to stop corrupt officials from siphoning off funds allocated to improve their villages; to demand proper wages and so forth. She sought to make her point with a 13-minute documentary on actual instances of local officials misusing special funds for non-existent buildings and roads, and work records that showed payments to workers for wells that were never built! All this led her to float Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathana (MKSS) in 1990, a pressure group of farmers, to demand the public’s right to scrutinize official records for funds allocated. She said her activism had paid off, as nine states, including Rajasthan, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra have adopted the Right to Information Bill since then. The Freedom of Information Act 2002 was also an outcome of the movement started by her. She recounted her other successes, such as when she forced the government to release tens of hundreds of tons of grain rotting in their warehouses to feed the starving farmers in Rajasthan, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh states. Though she and her activists had to cut through layers and layers of bureaucracy as they shuttled endlessly between different government departments and ministries, they were happy that they were able to get the grain released, she said. Asked by some of the guests in the audience from Silicon Valley how she viewed the IT revolution and its impact on rural life, Aruna said: “Technology (and progress) has hurt us a lot especially in the past decade - so we have decided to use it to our advantage too. With IT comes a need for a lot of infrastructure but that is still missing from a lot of villages. Even if we have a computer or two, for that we have to have electricity too.” She said some good had also resulted from IT. For instance, affidavits of electoral candidate are now posted online for people to download and access; Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra have made attempts for electronic government “which is effective in a very limited way”. Not content with her replies on IT, Vivek Anand of Sunnyvale drew her attention to the tens of thousands of jobs — call centers, other high-tech jobs — IT had created in India. Asked if she would ever run for political office, Roy said she and MKSS were fighting the very evils that characterize electoral politics in India, and therefore, could not expect support from any quarters. Roy disclosed that she was shortly going to launch a campaign for “transparency in all court systems”, to lend support to attorney Indira Jayasingh of Delhi, who has so far been crusading single-handedly for this. Stanford students Shalini Ahmed, Bobby Basu, Ankit Garg of Sanskriti (Stanford), who volunteered to help put together the talk, were very pleased with the turnout, the topic and the diverse audience. Sam Rao