Dear Friends, I am sure you would be watching Satyamev jayate every Sunday. Last Sunday, their topic was governance, corruption, democracy and power of people where Amir took up several people driven acts that is changing the country like RTI and so on. In the same episode at 57th minute in this video you would see the story of an illiterate RTI activist called Sanjay Sahni from village Ratnauli in Muzaffarpur in Bihar. I had first met him when he was awarded by Civil Society magazine about two years back and asked him if we can help in his activism as RTI in his village as his prime backbone of the movement was Internet. He used access Internet and go to the link which would have the list of NREGA job card holders name on the website with the information if they had been paid or not. He used and is still does, take the print out of the names and would go back to village, bring in one place all the names people and ask if they had got the payment, if they have the job card and if they ever applied? Finding that answer to all of them was no, they figured out that others from panchayat were eating money on their behalf. We thus told him and offered him CIRC (Community Information Resource Center) in his village with Internet connectivity which would like all our other centers - 50 so far - in various parts of the country - function as information provisioning center, digital literacy center and also various other digital services center. Since then, now about a year, the Ratnauli CIRC get que some time as long as 400 people - all of them want to see their name and status and based on which fight for their rights. I had written his story also in my column in Mint at: livemint/Specials/rQE7jtlWGDiLykOV2QIihK/Agents-of-the-Internet.html. You may also see the story of Ratnauli in a video that we made and is available online at: https://youtube/watch?v=vhehDyQ4pG8. But I am sure because of this story featured in Satyamev Jayate program, now the power of Internet can be seen widespread.
Posted on: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 18:19:21 +0000