The Right to Information: In 2005, the government of India passed the Right to Information (RTI) Act, guaranteeing citizens' access to information from government departments and agencies. RTI was a result of sustained advocacy dating back to the early 1990s, when a rural people's organisation, the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (Workers and Peasants Power Union) held jan sunwais or public hearings in Rajasthan demanding that official records be made public, as well as social audits of government spending and redress mechanisms to ensure just processes of citizenship. RTI now mandates that each government department create structures and procedures to enable and monitor this process, with penalties if government officers do not provide information within a month.
The RTI has led to important gains for women. The case of five elderly women from Tilonia, Rajasthan, illustrates the new standards for government accountability. The five women, who had not received their pensions for over four months, approached their district administrator, who discovered that the reason for the delay was the women's missing birth certificates. He immediately ordered the payment of their pensions, and informed the women how they might obtain birth certificates from the village patwari, or local revenue officer. In this case, the women's complaint was addressed without even having to file a formal petition.
The Right to Food: In February 2003, Triveni Devi, a resident of Sunder Nagri in Delhi, sparked off a process that led to the reform of the city-wide food distribution system and ensured that thousands of poor women receive their entitlements to food rations. Supported by a civil society organisation at the forefront of the RTI movement, Devi demanded to see records from the Department of Food and Civil Supplies, which showed that 25 kilogrammes of rice and 25 kilogrammes of wheat were purportedly being issued to her every month. These were rations that her family could not do without, but which they had never seen.
Following Triveni's application, the Public Grievance Committee, a city government mechanism set up to handle citizens' complaints, asked for the records of all 3,000 food ration shops in Delhi to be made public. When shop owners refused, 109 women from different areas across Delhi filed separate applications for the records of rations owed to them and participated in public hearings on the distribution system. As a result, they began to receive their rations more regularly. But the women's struggle was far from over. One of the main advocates in the campaign, a young woman who ran a resource centre for information on rationing rules and filing complaints, had her throat slashed by two unidentified assailants (luckily, she survived). In response to the public condemnation that ensued, the city government of Delhi made all ration records available for public scrutiny, and ordered that any complaints against the shops result in their suspension within 24 hours.
The Right to Work: In 2005, the Indian government passed the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which has resulted in the creation of the world's largest social security system. The law guarantees 100 days of employment on rural public works projects to a member of every rural household, and one-third of the workers are intended to be women. NREGA reflects the government's commitment to supporting women's employment, including through locally available projects and child care facilities.vi Women's share of employment in the scheme has been over 40 per cent, rising to 82 per cent in Tamil Nadu.
The NREGA is changing the gendered landscape of rural work. In Dungarpur, Rajasthan, for example, more than two-thirds of the work on NREGA projects – digging, breaking, lifting and depositing stones – is done by women, who claim their work and their wages with pride. In Karauli district, also in Rajasthan, at the initiative of a female panchayat leader, a 21-member monitoring committee of women was formed for the NREGA across panchayats in the region. As a result, government officers have become more responsive to local needs, such as female and youth unemployment.
