UPPSC 2019 Prelims Q65: Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), a Social Movement

Q: What is the answer to UPPSC 2019 Prelims Q65?

B. 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.

UPPSC 2019 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 65 of 150

Verified against the official question paper. Answer as per the official UPPSC answer key.

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

(a)RTE Act
(b)RTI Act
(c)MGNREGA
(d)National Health Mission (NHM)

Answer

Why

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 others are wrong

(a)RTE Act — 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)MGNREGA — 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)National Health Mission (NHM) — 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.

The option set is built so that every choice is a real rights-based law or mission of roughly the same era, and the discrimination has to come from knowing which campaign produced which law. Two anchors settle it. First, the movement's own slogan is about accounts, not about employment, education or health. Second, the chain of dates: the Rajasthan Right to Information Act came in 2000, five years before the central Act of 2005 — a State law that exists precisely because the campaign was fought in Rajasthan. Keep in mind that the MKSS's later, well-known work on NREGA social audits is downstream of the RTI, not a rival claim to it.

Key facts

Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan — founded in 1990 at Devdungri, Rajsamand district, Rajasthan, by Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey and Shankar Singh.
Its campaign slogan, 'hamara paisa, hamara hisab' (our money, our accounts), and its signature method, the jan sunwai or public hearing, in which official records are read aloud in the village.
A prolonged public sit-in at Beawar, Rajasthan in 1996 pressed the demand for a statutory right of access to records; the National Campaign for People's Right to Information was formed the same year.
Rajasthan enacted its own Right to Information Act in 2000; the central Right to Information Act was passed in 2005 and came into force that October.
The RTI Act, 2005 repealed the Freedom of Information Act, 2002, which had been enacted but never brought into force.
Aruna Roy received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership in 2000 for this work.

A close portrait of an elderly woman with short white hair, rectangular glasses and a dark red bindi, wearing a black blouse with a round campaign badge and a maroon sari. — The MKSS co-founder whose jan sunwai campaign in rural Rajasthan turned a wage dispute into the movement behind the Right to Information Act, 2005.Image: Augustus Binu : flickr · Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Study next

Right to Information Act, 2005 — public authority, Public Information Officer, exemptions under Section 8, and the appeal ladderCentral Information Commission and State Information Commissions: composition, appointment and the 2019 amendment to their tenure and termsSocial audit under MGNREGA and the role of Gram Sabhas in verifying muster rollsOther rights-based legislation of the 2000s: MGNREGA (2005), Forest Rights Act (2006), RTE (2009), National Food Security Act (2013)Civil society, pressure groups and the National Advisory Council as routes of policy influenceWhistleblower protection and the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013 as the accountability sequel to the RTI

Common traps

Picking MGNREGA because the MKSS is a workers-and-peasants organisation. The MKSS uses the RTI to audit NREGA works; the law the movement itself produced is the RTI.
Assuming the RTI Act, 2005 was India's first transparency law. Several States, Rajasthan among them in 2000, had their own Acts earlier, and a central Freedom of Information Act was passed in 2002 but never brought into force.
Treating the RTI as a purely urban, middle-class instrument. Its origin is a rural minimum-wage dispute, and that origin is exactly what these questions test.

UPPSC frames this as a one-line movement-to-law match; UPSC prefers the machinery of the Act itself — who counts as a public authority, what Section 8 exempts, how the Information Commissions are appointed — so learn both the origin story and the statutory detail.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.

Practice

practice — not a real PYQ
The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan is best known for pioneering which method of exposing corruption in public works?
- (a)Public interest litigation in the High Courts
- (b)Jan sunwai, the public hearing at which official records are read aloud in the village
- (c)Consumer courts under the Consumer Protection Act
- (d)Parliamentary petitions to the Public Accounts Committee
Answer(b) Jan sunwai, the public hearing at which official records are read aloud in the village — the MKSS held these from the mid-1990s in rural Rajasthan, matching muster rolls and bills against what labourers said they had actually been paid, and the method became the template for social audit.
practice — not a real PYQ
The Right to Information Act, 2005 repealed which earlier central law?
- (a)The Official Secrets Act, 1923
- (b)The Public Records Act, 1993
- (c)The Freedom of Information Act, 2002
- (d)The Central Vigilance Commission Act, 2003
Answer(c) The Freedom of Information Act, 2002 — it was enacted but never brought into force and was repealed by the RTI Act, 2005. The Official Secrets Act, 1923 was not repealed; it survives, with the RTI Act overriding it where the two conflict.