May 5, 2026 · 5:00 PM
Ramprasad Meena has been invited to speak at the Central Information Commission's RTI Day event on May 22. He will address a national audience of information commissioners, civil society organisations and government officials on 'The RTI as Infrastructure.'
Apr 24, 2026 · 12:00 PM
Inspired by Meena's campaign, a group of 18 villages in Ajmer district have collectively filed 14 RTIs about a stalled solar pump project under PM-KUSUM. They are using a template RTI Meena drafted based on his experience.
In April 2021, Ramprasad Meena retired after 34 years of teaching mathematics at the government secondary school in Isarda village, Sawai Madhopur district, Rajasthan. The village had been without piped drinking water for three years, after a PHED (Public Health Engineering Department) pipeline project — sanctioned in 2018 under the Jal Jeevan Mission — was abandoned mid-construction when the contractor defaulted. Meena decided to use the only tool a private citizen has against bureaucratic inertia: the Right to Information Act.
“I am a mathematics teacher. I know the language of data. The government said the project was complete. I asked for the completion certificate. They could not give it because the pipeline was not built. That one RTI taught me that the RTI is more powerful than any petition.”
— Ramprasad Meena, Isarda village, Sawai Madhopur
A Methodical Campaign
Between June 2021 and December 2023, Meena filed 84 RTI applications — to the PHED, the District Collector, the Rajasthan Jal Jeevan Mission office, and eventually the Central Jal Shakti Ministry. Each application cost him ₹10 in postal order plus around ₹200 in stationery, photocopying and travel. His total expenditure: approximately ₹25,000. He filed first appeals when responses were delayed. He filed second appeals with the Rajasthan State Information Commission. When the Commission ruled in his favour and the Executive Engineer still did not act, Meena approached the Rajasthan High Court.
Ramprasad Meena's RTI Campaign — By the Numbers
- 84 RTI applications filed over 3 years (2021–2023)
- 41 responses received; 43 met with silence (deemed refusal)
- 9 first appeals to PHED; 7 second appeals to SIC Rajasthan
- 3 SIC orders directing the department to provide information
- 1 High Court petition; contempt notice issued to Executive Engineer
- Result: ₹4.8 crore pipeline project retendered, completed January 2025
- 4,200 households in 4 villages now receive piped water
The Rajasthan High Court, hearing Meena's petition in May 2023, found that the Executive Engineer had not responded to 11 RTI requests, violated 3 State Information Commission orders, and submitted false completion certificates to Jal Jeevan Mission's monitoring portal. The Court issued a contempt notice and, in a rare move, directed the district administration to recover the cost of the retender process — ₹1.2 crore — from the original contractor and the departmental officers who had certified incomplete work as complete.
84
RTIs filed
4,200
Households with new water access
₹25K
Meena's total cost
3 years
Campaign duration
The pipeline was re-tendered, awarded to a new contractor, and completed in January 2025. Meena is now training 22 young people in Sawai Madhopur — including three women — on how to file effective RTIs. 'The RTI Act is the Constitution of the common citizen,' he told NT. 'It just needs someone to use it properly.' NT's reporting has confirmed that all four villages — Isarda, Chandlai, Kherda Kalan, and Saipau — now have functional household tap connections providing water for at least 8 hours per day.
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Deepak Rao
Ground Correspondent
Deepak is a field journalist covering agriculture, rural economy and civic rights. Based in Bhopal.