Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), a Social Movement has been associated with which of the following in India ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, RTI Act. The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan is the organisation of workers and peasants founded in 1990 at Devdungri in Rajsamand district, Rajasthan, by Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey and Shankar Singh. It began by demanding the statutory minimum wage for labourers on drought-relief and public works, and ran into a wall: the muster rolls and bills that recorded who had worked and what had been paid were falsified, and the villagers were not allowed to see them. The demand for wages therefore turned into a demand for the documents — 'hamara paisa, hamara hisab', our money, our accounts. From 1994 the MKSS began holding jan sunwais, public hearings at which official records were read aloud in the village and the people named in them stood up to say what they had actually received; a long public sit-in at Beawar in 1996 pressed the demand for a legal right of access to records. That campaign widened into the National Campaign for People's Right to Information, produced the Rajasthan Right to Information Act in 2000, and fed directly into the central Right to Information Act, 2005. No other Indian law is so directly traceable to a single grassroots movement.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 flows from Article 21A, inserted by the 86th Amendment in 2002, and from decades of campaigning by education-rights groups and litigation such as the Unni Krishnan judgment. The MKSS is not associated with it.  (c) The most tempting option, and the one to answer honestly: the MKSS did work on the right to employment in Rajasthan, and its activists later became central to the social audit of NREGA works, which the Act itself mandates. But the movement is identified with the law it brought into being — the RTI — and the audit of NREGA is something the MKSS does using the RTI, not the campaign that defines it. The question asks what the movement has been associated with, and its signature achievement is the right to information.  (d) The National Rural Health Mission of 2005, later subsumed in the National Health Mission, is a government health programme; the civil-society formation associated with monitoring it is the Jan Swasthya Abhiyan. The MKSS has no defining connection with it.

Concept: The RTI is the standard Indian example of a law produced from below rather than drafted from above. The MKSS's insight was that transparency is not an abstract democratic virtue but a wage issue: a labourer cannot prove he was underpaid unless he can read the muster roll. The method it invented — the jan sunwai, at which official records are read out in public before the people they describe — turned paper into evidence and gave the demand for access a concrete purpose. From that came a sequence a student should be able to recite: local demand for records, State-level campaign, State law, national campaign, central Act.

State PCS 2019 Q65 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q65 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer