Infocracy India, an initiative to increase RTI activism amongst Indian law students, is launching a project to make RTI drafting an obligatory part of the Class 10 school syllabus and to investigate whether minimum wage is paid to campus labourers.

The petition to “Include RTI drafting in Class 10 school syllabus” can be signed online by supporters and reads:

“Just as school students learn 'letter writing' for their English, Hindi or other language courses; they should similarly learn 'writing RTI Applications'.

“Very little is achieved when a student get to know just that a Right to Information Act exists through a small description in the civics course.

“When she actually writes to an RTI application in class and for his exams, we believe, she is doubly empowered and enabled to use the tool to fight corruption.”

Infocracy India founder Tanuj Kalia said that the organisation would seek the support of RTI activists, educators, media, education boards, the Ministry of Human Resource Development, and leading counsel at the Supreme Court and the Delhi High Court to bolster the petition.

Please sign the petition here and if you can put us in touch with people who can help us get this petition approved and implemented please contact us at +91 727 8556 698.

Project: Class IV Employees in Universities

Infocracy India is also kick-starting its first RTI campaign to find the status, working conditions and salaries of class IV employees across Universities in India.

Infocracy India hopes that this RTI campaign will help the cleaning staff, mess workers and others employed in India’s Universities to get the statutory minimum wages and decent work conditions.

Infocracy India will ensure the application is filed in as many Indian law schools as possible, with seven law colleges’ legal aid societies having so far expressed an interest in supporting this and other initiatives.

The application was drafted by Prashant Reddy, an NLSIU Bangalore alumnus and chief mentor at Infocracy India with the support of Jay Sayta, a first-year student at NUJS Kolkata. Saurabh Bhattacharya, a Nalsar Hyderabad graduate who teaches labour law in NUJS also provided valuable inputs on employment law aspects of the petition.

In case you want to file a similar RTI application with the public information officer in your University, please do so and let us know that you are participating so the results can be shared.

The draft RTI application template on this issue is available for free download and comment.

This RTI application will be filed with colleges in early April. Please leave your inputs as comments on how to make this RTI application more rigorous and actionable.

Support and join Infocracy India

In case your law school’s legal aid society wants to support Infocracy India please let us know and read here for further details. Infocracy India would love to have the support of LAS’ teams across law schools in India.

If you are a law student and wish to Infocracy us as a student researcher/activist, please do see the details here.

The position requires only online work and occasionally some travel within your locality. The last date to apply is has been extended one final time to end of day Saturday, 2 April.

Like the Infocracy Facebook page at www.facebook.com/iandrti