After decades of struggles by environmental and social movements \, India enacted the Right to Information (RTI) Act in 2005. With more tee th than the American FOIA\, the Act for the first time opened large swathe s of government files to public disclosure and scrutiny. Although scholars have generally dismissed such transparency laws as symptomatic of neolibe ral governance\, Professor Aga argues that struggles around information mu st be contextualized in the historical sociology of state power and corpor ate capital.
He examines how lawyers\, journalists\, and activists engaged the state via the RTI Act on the issue of Covid-19 relief and miti gation\, and how the state responded to the demands for transparency. Stru ggles over information\, far from floundering against the limits of neolib eral governance\, have in fact effectively diagnosed the actual\, non-libe ral character of India’s political economy. And this accounts for both the act’s transformative potential\, as well as the intensity of push-back fr om the state and corporate capital.
Aniket Aga \;teaches in the Department of Geography\, SUNY Buffalo. He is the author of Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary India \;(Yale Univers ity Press\, 2021) which won the 2022 Fleck Best Book Prize from the Societ y for the Social Studies of Science (4S).
His research lies at the intersection of science and technology\, development\, and democracy. He c ollaborates with journalists and activists and has published in the Jo urnal of Peasant Studies\, Annals of the American Association of Geographers\, and Article14\, among others.