After the Flood, Sixty-Six Families Used the Right to Information to Find Their Claims

Recovery is not only rebuilding. It is knowing whether a claim was recorded, rejected, or simply never looked at.

For a family whose house has been damaged by flood, compensation is meaningful only if eligibility, assessment and payment can be followed. Delay and silence leave a household unable to tell the difference between a decision and an oversight.

DEHAT’s model-village RTI initiative worked in Bhauri, Bhawanipur Ramgarhi, Parsaura, Gauriya and Meer Ganj–Shekh Daheer. Sixty local people learned how the Right to Information could be applied to the things that shape an ordinary week. Across sixty camps, community members prepared three hundred applications to the relevant departments.

They were not attending awareness sessions. They identified concrete issues, wrote the questions, filed the applications and used what came back to go and ask again.

Sixty-six families received compensation for houses lost or damaged during the floods.

RTI did not create a new benefit. It made an existing public decision visible enough to question. Working through a local group also meant no claimant was doing this alone, and the procedural knowledge stayed in the village with people who could help a neighbour next time.

Resilience is usually described through embankments, shelters and relief. It also includes the capacity to navigate a recovery system after the water has gone down.

It helped affected families see how a public decision about them was being handled.