India’s elected officials aren’t used to scrutiny, but change is literally on the cards. Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS), a group of citizen activists based in Delhi, uses the Right to Information Act to produce a scorecard for each of the subcontinent’s MPs, detailing how many times they’ve attended parliament, how many debates they’ve spoken in, and how they’ve spent local development funds. They distribute the cards throughout constituencies, pinning them to lampposts and handing them out in the slums. The results have been staggering.
‘When one politician visited a slum in his constituency, the people chased him out,’ says SNS activist Amrita Johri. ‘In the past, he was treated like a celebrity. But after people saw how he’d performed, he had to stand down.’
