The Right to Information and Covid-19 Vaccination: Diagnosing India's Political Economy

After decades of struggles by environmental and social movements, India enacted the Right to Information (RTI) Act in 2005. With more teeth than the American FOIA, the Act for the first time opened large swathes of government files to public disclosure and scrutiny. Although scholars have generally dismissed such transparency laws as symptomatic of neoliberal governance, Professor Aga argues that struggles around information must be contextualized in the historical sociology of state power and corporate capital.

He examines how lawyers, journalists, and activists engaged the state via the RTI Act on the issue of Covid-19 relief and mitigation, and how the state responded to the demands for transparency. Struggles over information, far from floundering against the limits of neoliberal governance, have in fact effectively diagnosed the actual, non-liberal character of India’s political economy. And this accounts for both the act’s transformative potential, as well as the intensity of push-back from 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 University Press, 2021) which won the 2022 Fleck Best Book Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S).

His research lies at the intersection of science and technology, development, and democracy. He collaborates with journalists and activists and has published in the Journal of Peasant Studies, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and Article14, among others.