The obstacle is rarely the missing form. It is not knowing which office is holding the answer.
A household with an unexplained electricity demand, a compensation claim that has gone quiet, or land allotted on paper that somebody else is standing on has a specific problem: the decision exists somewhere, in some file, in some office, and there is no way to see it. Distance and unfamiliar procedure turn that into a permanent condition.
The RTI work was built to put that procedural knowledge inside the village. Camps combined an explanation of the Act with the actual problems residents walked in with. Applications were drafted on the spot and sent to the department concerned. Two community members from the forest villages went to a national workshop and came back and taught what they had learned to others.
Five Gram Panchayats - Bhauri, Bhawaniapur Ramgarhi, Parsaura, Gauriya and Meer Ganj–Shekh Daheer, one in each of five blocks - became the focused sites. Twelve camps in each. Sixty residents supported to use the process themselves. Three hundred applications.
None of it was a petition for help. Every application asked a public body to disclose a record or act on a decision it had already made.
The results were specific. Thirty-two landless families obtained possession of land already allotted to them. Seventy-eight families stopped being charged for electricity connections they did not have. Sixty-six families received compensation for houses damaged in floods.
Across the wider programme the numbers were larger - nine camps with 3,778 residents, 2,876 applications drafted, 1,234 individual and 89 community problems recorded as resolved. Those aggregates need reconciling against the five-Panchayat figures before anyone quotes them, and the ones above are the ones the model sites can carry.
The application is a small object. What it does is reverse who is required to explain themselves.
Every application asked a public body to disclose a record or act on a decision it had already made.
One Camp, Sixty People, Three Hundred Answers
An RTI camp needs a facilitator who knows the Act, paper, postage and a day. The families who come are usually the ones who have already been turned away somewhere else.