- Lived:
- born 1946, Madras (Chennai) → Delhi's corridors of power → a mud hut in Devdungri village, Rajasthan, where the real work happened
- Field:
- activism — transparency, the right to information, the right to work; co-founder of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS)
- The Big Idea:
- Your vote elects a government; your right to its files is what makes it answer to you between elections. A fight over unpaid wages in rural Rajasthan became the campaign that won every Indian the legal right to read the state's own records.
- In their words:
- "The structures of power have to be questioned and made to deliver." (from an interview with the Forus civil-society network; as of September 2026)
- If you remember one thing:
- An officer of the elite civil service resigned, went to live on a labourer's wage in a Rajasthan village, and helped ordinary villagers discover that a government ledger read aloud in public is the most dangerous document in a democracy — and out of that discovery came the Right to Information Act, 2005.