Aruna Roy

Aruna Roy (born May 26, 1946, Madras [now Chennai], India) is an Indian social activist chiefly known for her initiatives to fight corruption and promote government transparency and accountability. She cofounded the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS; Workers’ and Peasants’ Strength Union) in 1990, an organization devoted to empowering farmers and rural workers. She also played a vital role in the enactment of the Right to Information Act (2005) in India. Roy was presented with the Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership in 2000.

Early life, education, and career

Roy was born into a Tamil Brahmin family and is the eldest of Hema and E.D. Jayaram’s four children. She received a graduate degree in English literature from the Indraprastha College for Women (under the University of Delhi) in 1965 and a postgraduate degree from the University of Delhi in 1967. She joined the Indian Administrative Service (IAS; India’s civil service) in 1968.

From civil service to social work

Roy was dissatisfied with the extent to which an IAS officer could effectively help the masses and left the IAS in 1974. The same year, she joined the Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC; also known as Barefoot College), a rural-development organization founded by her husband and social activist, Sanjit Roy, in 1972 in Tilonia, Rajasthan. For the next nine years, Roy worked with the SWRC toward the empowerment of rural people, simultaneously acquiring a deeper understanding of their challenges and sociocultural dynamics.

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Cofounding Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS)

In 1983 Roy left the SWRC, as she felt that the organization offered little scope for political activism. In 1987 Roy, along with social activists Shankar Singh and Nikhil Dey, moved to Devdungri in Rajasthan. There, in 1990, they set up the MKSS with residents to support rural laborers and increase the accountability of local governments. The MKSS focused chiefly on championing the workers’ right to fair and government-mandated wages. The organization launched multiple hunger strikes, which successfully procured the disbursement of wages for a group of laborers whose payments had been withheld.

Advocacy for right to information

During its endeavors to secure rightful compensation for rural workers, the MKSS discovered discrepancies in local government records. In 1994 it started organizing public hearings where such documents, and any inconsistencies within, were examined. Soon, a unanimous demand for better access to such records and greater transparency from the local government crystallized. Roy was one of the activists at the forefront of the MKSS’s dharnas (nonviolent demonstrations) and advocacy for the public’s right to information.

This grassroots campaign soon inspired a national-level demand for the right to information. Eventually, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, several Indian states, such as Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra, passed a Right to Information Act, and in 2005 the national Right to Information Act was approved by the Indian Parliament.

Involvement in other campaigns and later career

Roy and the MKSS were integral to the campaigns for the right to food and the right to work that notably led to the enactment of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA; now Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act [MGNREGA]) in 2005. The act guarantees a hundred days of employment annually to adults in rural regions seeking unskilled manual work. Roy also served as a member (2004–06 and 2010–13) of the National Advisory Council (NAC), an advisory body set up in 2004 by India’s United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government to assist the prime minister. The NAC was pivotal in the planning of both the RTI Act and the MGNREGA. In 2013, as part of the Pension Parishad (“Pension Council”), Roy also lobbied for the inclusion of a universal pension for older people in India’s national budget for the forthcoming fiscal year.

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