In the heartland of Rajasthan, nestled on the slopes of the Aravalli range, lies a village that changed the course of Indian democracy.
Devdungri, a small settlement in Rajsamand district’s Bhim block, is widely recognised as the birthplace of India’s Right to Information (RTI) movement. Here, in a simple mud-and-stone house, three activists began a conversation with rural workers that would eventually reach the floor of Parliament.
Three people, one question
In 1987, three people from vastly different backgrounds came together in Devdungri. Aruna Roy, a former Indian Administrative Service officer who had resigned to work with the rural poor, joined hands with Shankar Singh, a local activist with exceptional communication skills, and Nikhil Dey, who had returned from the United States with a commitment to social change.
They settled in Devdungri, living simply alongside the community they had come to work with.
“The idea of living in Devdungri was to live with the people, like them,” Roy later recalled in an interview with The Week.
One of the first people they connected with was Lal Singh, a police constable who had been dismissed for protesting the alleged misuse of constables as domestic servants.
“I met them within months of their arrival. We used to roam around on bicycles,” Lal Singh — now secretary of the School for Democracy, a non-profit in Rajasthan — recalled.
A modest mud-and-stone home in Devdungri became the platform for conversations between activists and villagers helped shape a national movement. Photograph: (Outlook India)
At the time, rural workers across Rajasthan had limited means to verify whether government relief works were being implemented fairly, or whether wages recorded on official muster rolls had actually been paid.
Working alongside villagers like Lal Singh, the activists began organising workers to collectively raise questions about their dues.
As Roy later reflected, “When people came with grievances, it became clear that access to information was critical to securing basic rights.”
The question at the heart of their work was deceptively simple: if public money belongs to the people, why should people not be able to see how it is being spent?
Building the Jan Sunwai
Out of years of grassroots organising grew the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), formally established on 1 May 1990 during a rally attended by 1,000 people from 27 villages.
The organisation developed a tool that would become one of its most enduring contributions to Indian democracy: the jan sunwai, or public hearing.
The concept was elegant in its simplicity. Government officials were invited to bring their account books, which were then read aloud in a public space. Villagers could listen, cross-check, and speak up — verifying whether work documented on paper had actually been completed on the ground, and whether wages recorded in their names had reached them.
In December 1994, MKSS held its first jan sunwai in Kot Kirana village in Pali district. Subsequent hearings followed in Vijaypura, Jawaja, and other villages.
Aruna Roy, Shankar Singh and Nikhil Dey built the movement by living and working alongside rural communities. Photograph: (The Week)
What these hearings demonstrated, above all, was that ordinary citizens — many of them semi-literate, many of them women — were entirely capable of scrutinising official records when given access to them.
According to accounts documented by MKSS and reported by journalists who attended, villagers used the platform to formally raise discrepancies between what official records showed and what they had experienced on the ground. The jan sunwai gave these observations a documented, public platform for the first time.
Alongside the jan sunwais, MKSS also ran informal classes for children in the area who could not access formal schooling — part of a broader effort to build a community grounded in an understanding of its rights.
Shankar Singh, who had given up an opportunity to become a government schoolteacher to join the movement, spearheaded its communication strategies — using art, puppetry, theatre, dance, and music to engage the public.
His Ghotala Rath Yatra, a satirical street performance built around a decorated handcart, travelled from village to city, drawing people into conversations about governance and accountability through irony and song.
The jan sunwai model eventually drew a formal response from the state. On 5 April 1995, the Rajasthan Chief Minister pledged in the Assembly that the government would grant public access to development records — an acknowledgement that the public hearing process had surfaced questions requiring a policy response.
“Hamara Paisa, Hamara Hisaab”
When the state government’s promise remained unimplemented, MKSS launched a 40-day dharna at Beawar’s historic Chang Gate in April 1996.
The sit-in drew thousands from rural Rajasthan, with women forming the largest contingent.
MKSS used songs, street theatre and puppetry to turn discussions on governance into conversations people could join. Photograph: (Outlook India)
Lakshmi Narayan, a vegetable vendor at Chang Gate, recalled: “The place bustled with journalists and others from Jaipur, Delhi and beyond. Protesters came from nearby villages, and local traders provided accommodation, food and drinks throughout the dharna.”
It was at Beawar that the movement found its defining voice.
Sushila, an MKSS member who had studied only up to Class 4, was asked by a journalist why an uneducated woman wanted the RTI.
Her response, documented and widely recalled by those present, became the movement’s most enduring slogan:
“When I send my son to the market with ten rupees, I ask him to account for how he spent it. The government spends crores of rupees in our name. Why can we not ask for an accounting? Hamara paisa, hamara hisaab (our money, our accounts).”
The phrase captured something legal language never quite could: that transparency was not a technical demand, but a matter of basic dignity.
From village square to parliament
The sustained organising by MKSS, and the public evidence gathered through jan sunwais, helped build a broader coalition.
In 1996, the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information was established, bringing together civil society organisations from across India.
The testimonies and documented findings from Devdungri’s public hearings formed part of the evidence presented before parliamentary committees, making the case that transparency was a right, not a privilege.
As a former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court said at the RTI Mela in Beawar — held to mark twenty years of the Act — “The idea for RTI was born from the soil, from the struggle of ordinary workers and farmers, in villages more than in cities. It came from people like you.”
Rajasthan passed the first state-level RTI law in 2000. Tamil Nadu, Goa, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Delhi followed.
“Hamara Paisa, Hamara Hisaab” became the slogan that transformed the language of transparency into a demand for dignity. Photograph: (X/@nikhilmkss)
After years of sustained advocacy, the Right to Information Act was passed by Parliament in May 2005, received presidential assent in June, and came into force on 12 October 2005.
What RTI made possible
Once the law was in place, the accountability model pioneered in Devdungri could function at scale.
In Janawad Panchayat in Rajsamand district, over 70 villagers came together to collectively examine their panchayat records using Rajasthan’s RTI law — demonstrating, in practice, that communities could read official documents, cross-reference them with their own experiences, and build a verified, evidence-based picture of how public funds had been used in their name.
The process they undertook prompted a formal government inquiry.
Corroborated by the RTI records the villagers had gathered, the inquiry found that a significant number of listed development works could not be verified on the ground.
A subsequent inquiry, held in 2001, found evidence of misappropriation of funds, and the outcome included a state mandate for annual social audits of panchayat funds — a structural reform that continues to shape local governance in Rajasthan.
What the Janawad case illustrated most powerfully was not simply what had gone wrong, but what citizens could build: a replicable, community-led process for verifying public spending that was rigorous enough to trigger official accountability.
Passing It On: RTI and the Next Generation
From the beginning, the movement understood that lasting change required building knowledge across generations — not just winning individual cases.
Within Rajasthan’s broader RTI ecosystem, this took several forms.
RTI Manch, a Jaipur-based organisation that works in close collaboration with MKSS, built a network of nearly 100 student volunteers from the University of Rajasthan.
These students carried RTI awareness into villages near Jaipur, explaining both the Act and MGNREGA entitlements to residents, while also setting up RTI kiosks at the university and in public spaces across the city.
The movement also found its way into classrooms.
The Government of Rajasthan included a chapter on the RTI movement in the state’s high school textbooks, acknowledging the contributions of MKSS and the people of Beawar and Bhim.
The chapter remained in the syllabus across changes in political leadership — a marker of cross-party recognition of the movement’s place in the state’s democratic history.
Perhaps the most vivid account of how RTI was introduced to younger generations comes from Shankar Singh himself.
He described a volunteer named Vineet who visited villages with a small projector, casting the Rajasthan government’s Jan Soochna Portal onto a white wall.
Children and villagers learning to access public information — reflecting the movement’s effort to pass the idea of accountability to future generations. Photograph: (The Week)
First, Vineet screened a short film on RTI to draw in children who believed they were simply watching a movie. Then he asked a child to bring their family’s ration card, entered the number into the portal, and projected the result onto the wall.
The child saw his father’s photograph appear and called out in surprise.
Vineet then showed the family’s complete ration record — how much wheat they had received, and when.
In that moment, the idea that a government database contained information that belonged to them — and that they could access it — became immediate and real.
As Aruna Roy has said: “The demand for transparency stems from our fundamental right to a dignified life.”
The Work Continues
Two decades after the RTI Act came into force, the law continues to evolve — and so does the citizen engagement that gave birth to it.
According to the Central Information Commission’s 2023–24 annual report, 1.75 million RTI applications were filed across the country, reflecting the scale at which ordinary Indians have adopted the tool that Devdungri helped build.
Shankar Singh framed the road ahead in characteristically collective terms:
“This era of RTI will continue only if there is a movement today. In places where people are fighting and struggling together, they get the information they need.”
The legacy of Devdungri is not simply the legislation that emerged from it — it is the proof of concept that preceded it.
Before there was a law, there was a group of villagers in Rajasthan who established that reading a government file aloud in a public space was a legitimate act of citizenship.
The jan sunwai model they built has since informed social audit frameworks across India and has been referenced in governance discussions internationally.
Justice Shah, speaking at Beawar in 2025, captured the spirit of what that museum — and the movement behind it — could represent going forward: a place where “the past helps inspire democratic initiatives in the present and future”, and where the story of ordinary citizens shaping national policy is preserved for generations to come.
Devdungri stands as evidence that lasting change can begin in a village square — when ordinary people decide they have the right to know and, in knowing, find the tools to shape the world they live in.
