Erstwhile Fellows
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Anjali Bhardwaj
Anjali is the founder of the Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS), a people’s group based in Delhi that has been working since 2003 to build an empowered and vigilant citizenry based on the right to information.
Anjali did her BA at the Lady Shri Ram College. The institution not only gave her a grounding in Economics but shaped her outlook to the world with its ambience of political awareness and dialogue. She went on to study environmental management at Oxford following it up with a stint at the World Bank. Anjalis’s conviction that information is at the root of bringing about real change led her into the RTI movement. SNS was born out of her need to broaden the reach of her work and make a more meaningful contribution to the development sector.
SNS started working in slum settlements where people were completely unaware about their basic rights. It has broken new ground and made RTI a truly potent tool in the hands of the urban poor who have now become empowered and proficient at using the Act to claim their right to water, electricity, sanitation, education etc. SNS acts as an interface between the government and the people, and seeks to restore power to the citizen.
A landmark initiative of SNS has been the dissemination of MLA and MP performance report cards in leading print dailies in Delhi and Bihar. The group is also behind the Central Information Commission’s order to the Delhi Government where display of information regarding utilisation of local area development funds by MLAs and Councillors of all municipalities is compulsory as per Section 4 of the RTI Act.
Anjali is a Working Committee Member of National Campaign People’s Right to Information (NCPRI), a platform of individuals and organizations that led the right to information movement culminating in the passage of the RTI Act 2005. NCPRI has been at the forefront of the campaign for an effective Lokpal, advocating for an anti-corruption body with a federal structure to tackle different forms of systemic corruption appropriately.
Anjali is also a member of the Right to Food campaign, a network of organizations and individuals advocating for universalization of the public distribution system, right to work, land reform and social security.
