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.

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.

What these hearings demonstrated, above all, was that ordinary citizens — many of them semi-literate, many of them women — were entirely capable of scrutinising........

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