RTI in the right hands - Project NOUS

OBJECTIVE :

To find out and eradicate any discrepancies in the system. Any public organization comes under the jurisdiction of the Right to Information act and using this as the primary tool against any corruption is the project's main objective. The end result being that people come to know of the power of this act and its usability.

PLAN OF ACTION :

To initiate and organize an NGO that employs people who survey, in turn, people from each district in a state divided according to economic classifications. Depending on the classification, people shall be asked to address a certain number of issues they think are pressing. The importance of classification is to develop a general idea of the public mind and a generalization of issues according to economic class. Also, considering the economic imbalance in our country and the world over for that matter, obviously a larger number of families are poorer than the rest. So, the number of poor families surveyed shall be more, thus addressing more issues of the oppressed classes than the economically forward classes. At the end of every 15 continuous days of interviewing people or at the end of surveying 7500 families, whichever comes first, the questions posed by the people shall be pooled and the most pressing, non-personal issues that deserve attention will be put across to the relevant department using the RTI act.

WORKING :

The first 6 months to 1 year of the NGO's work would be to recruit people to work for it and to collect information about and classify the earning, tax-paying citizens of the state. From this classification, an economic sample population must be created for each district. Each team of two people shall then survey one town/village/city at a time giving each place its necessary alotted time. Considering an initial staff of 76 people (i.e. 33 teams + 8 administrators + 2 project leaders; 2 ppl per team, 4 teams under each admin and 4 admins under each project leader), each team could interview 5 families a day. That gives us 2500 families surveyed in 15 days, leaving about one week for the administrators, who have been monitoring this whole process from base. The administrators, sort through the questions that have been sent to them along with feed back that has been taken at the time of interviewing the respective families and chose the most pressing issues, taking a maximum of 7,500 questions for forwarding in a month. The role of the administrator is to also classify the questions according to their relevant government departments and also based on urgency for later checking. This checking is carried out in the last few days of the month. The project leaders are the ones responsible for this follow up and filing cases for descrepencies. All questions and cases shall be in the name of these two project leaders.

WORK PLAN :

Day 1 – 15    (15 days)   -  Survey of different towns/villages/cities  in district

Day 16 – 22      (7 days) -  Organization of issues and sorting according to urgency and relevant department

Day 23                           -  Use of RTI act to pose questions to the said relevant departments.

Day 24 – End of month   -  Checking up of the previous months progress.

BUDGET :

An initial high end estimation of these activities with a work force of about 80 people (including salaries, transport, food and stay of the personnel, rent of office space, cost of filing requests and later cases etc...) turned out to about 11 lakhs a month, meaning simply that for every issue brought out, we are essentially spending approx. Rs. 150/-. A lower end estimate with a small task force, which would include me, my friend Anil and anyone else willing to help, a tank full of diesel, my Punto and a destination over the weekend.I consider this a small price to pay for the truth. But with our present financial situation, it would be a much better expenditure on the homeless and hungry, so cost cutting is what I'm currently focused on.

Here's a link to the RTI website....

and here's a link to the pdf file entailing all the information needed to understand this act. Please take time to go through it.

It is time we came forward and fulfilled our duties to our fellow Indians.

I think life is always a compromise for those who do not know what they want.

I know what I want. I want justice for my countrymen. I will not stand by and let the "rulers" hoard one lakh crores or two lakh crores for each of their tenures. Things have to change. We know that. Help me do it if you can. If you cant, the least you can do is spread the message.

Jai Hind.