Aruna Roy

Aruna Roy
President of the National Federation of Indian Women
Incumbent
Assumed office 2008
Preceded by	Dr. K. Saradamoni
Personal details
Born	(1946-06-26) 26 June 1946 Madras, British Raj
Nationality	Indian
Spouse(s)	Sanjit Roy ( m. 1970)
Alma mater	Indraprastha College (B.A.) Delhi University (M.A.) National Academy of Administration (M.P.Adm.)
Occupation	Activist, professor, union organiser and civil servant
Awards	Ramon Magsaysay Award, 2000 Lal Bahadur Shastri National Award, 2010

Aruna Roy (née Jayaram, born 26 June 1946) is an Indian social activist, professor, union organiser and former civil servant. She is the president of the National Federation of Indian Women and founder of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan.

Early life and education

Aruna was born on 6 June 1946, in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India (Chennai was known as Madras at the time and was a part of the Madras Presidency in British India), to parents Hema and E. D. Jayaram, a family of Tamil Brahmins. The family in which Aruna grew up was unconventional for their times and had a history of public service encompassing several generations. They rejected orthodox beliefs about caste and religion, and were known for a commitment to egalitarian principles.

All her grandparents were highly educated and included an engineer, a magistrate and a lawyer. The women in her family in particular served as role models for her. Her maternal grandmother was an educated woman and was deeply involved in volunteer social work among impoverished communities. She was born to an orthodox Tamil Brahmin family and had insisted on working with leprosy patients. Her maternal grandfather was an engineer, who was also involved in social work and wrote textbooks which he printed and distributed at his own cost to make them affordable for poorer children. Aruna's mother, Hema was sent to first class schools, where she had excelled in physics, mathematics, classical Sanskrit and sports. She was also well versed in the literature of several languages and participated in musical performances with the veena. The marriage between Hema and Jayaram defied norms as Hema had waited till she was 25 to get married and Jayaram belonged to a different sub-caste. Jayaram's family too had a history of social and political activism. He was sent to Shantiniketan and later became a lawyer by profession. He participated in the Indian independence movement, became a civil servant after independence and eventually retired as the Legal Adviser for the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. Jayaram also worked as a film and music critic and published reviews in various newspapers.

Aruna was the eldest of four siblings and had two sisters and a brother. The children were brought up to be multilingual and the family spoke three languages at home, namely Tamil, English and Hindi. She and her siblings were encouraged to be critical thinkers and discouraged from harboring any form of prejudice around ethnicity, caste or class and taught to respect people regardless of their social standing. Aruna was enrolled for two years at the Kalakshetra academy in Adyar, Chennai to train in Bharatanatyam and Carnatic music. She was also educated at a convent school and learned French on the insistence of her parents. She was then sent to the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry while her family moved to New Delhi. After an year at the ashram (hermitage), she expressed unhappiness with her situation so her family brought her to New Delhi where she completed the rest of her education. She attended the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan till the age of 16, when she applied for and successfully enrolled at the Indraprastha College for Women. Her admission was unexpected for the college faculty as she qualified at an age earlier than usual. Aruna majored in English Literature and then immediately went for a master's degree in 1965. She completed her post-graduation at the University of Delhi.

Following her education, she did not want to become a homemaker like most women during that time, describing it as a "limbo of passivity" but most fields were male dominated and her options were limited to journalism and teaching. For a short period of time, she became a professor of English Literature at her alma mater. In 1967, at the age of 21, she gave the difficult examinations for the Indian Administrative Service, which at the time had a selection rate of less than 0.1% and a marginal number of successful women candidates. Aruna was able to get selected on her first attempt at the examinations and was one of only 10 women to qualify in that year. She was influenced by feminism and considered joining the male dominated civil services in her father's footsteps to be a feminist choice. Mahatma Gandhi also had a significant influence on her family and their ethics, and she incorporated his philosophy in her way of thinking along with the philosophy of M. N. Roy. She was sent to the National Academy of Administration for an year's course followed by a year of supervised training called probation. Her batch had 100 successful candidates and the course included an intensive study of economics, law, languages and basic administration. It also included horse riding and guidelines on courtesies and etiquette from the British period. She along with other students in her batch had rebelled against various aspects of the curriculum and were able to introduce some reforms which were implemented for the batch after theirs.

Career and activism

Civil services (1968–1974)

Aruna was a part of the Union Territories cadre but was sent to Tamil Nadu for her probationary period as she knew the Tamil language. Her first assignment was that of an assistant to the supervising administrator (known as District Collector) of Tiruchi district. She opted for and was granted a transfer to Vellore district (at the time known as North Arcot) after her supervisor in Tiruchi refused to entertain her. T. V. Venkataram was the Collector in Vellore and he made a lasting impact on Aruna and others assigned as assistants to him. They were provided with independent charges under supervision which was unconventional in the system. Aruna married a batch mate of hers from University of Delhi, Sanjit Roy in 1970. He belonged to a Bengali family and had involved himself in social work since his time in college. She changed her name to Aruna Roy (née Jayaram) after marriage. By the time of her marriage, Roy was a Sub-Collector in the Union Territory of Pondicherry and after marriage, she was granted a transfer to the Union Territory of Delhi as she had married a person who lived in that region.

Roy's first assignment in Delhi was that of a Sub-Divisional Magistrate. She oversaw six police jurisdictions and besides her regular duties, had to manage student protests and election duty. Over the following period, she became the Deputy Secretary for finance and in 1973, was promoted to the position of Secretary to the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi. She was disillusioned with the civil services by this time. Aruna had joined the services as she saw it as a means of working for social justice within a constitutional framework, with the conviction that the provisions of the Indian Constitution, if implemented, was the correct standards for providing decent and equitable treatment to citizens. She was aware before joining that there was corruption in the system but thought it was possible to enact reform from within. In contrast, after around 7 years within the system, she came to see the organisation as a hidebound institution where feudal and colonial values were nurtured. According to her, while it was possible for honest officials to not engage in collusion, the only recourse they had at most times was silence and inaction.

She states that corruption didn't exist just in the form of graft but also in decision making and identified three primary problems with the organisation; one that of inability to engage in ethical disagreement over a policy or decision that would "lead to people’s lives being damaged", another being the negative consequences of addressing malpractice by politicians or even others in the bureaucracy and the third being the requirement to carry out orders regardless of any negative impact it might have. She describes the institution to have developed an elitist approach, with those granted promotions for liaisons with powerful politicians and being of little help to those most in need such as the poor. Concluding that the institution was not moving in the right direction and that it wasn't possible to bring change from within, as hierarchy suppressed all protestations and contradictions, she decided to eventually leave the civil services. Through the IAS, Aruna was however able to gain an understanding of the workings of the State and develop connections in a network of educated and influential people whom she considered to be honest officers.

Barefoot College (1974–1983)

Roy had consulted with her family and friends before resigning from the IAS but most of them discouraged her from doing so. In 1974, she took a six month leave to join her husband at the Social Work Research Centre (commonly known as the Barefoot College) and witnessing a relation of equality between her husband and the people there, compared to the deferential treatment she had received as a bureaucrat. Later in the same year, she submitted her resignation from the civil service after waiting for her brother to finish college as she was a major contributor to the income of her parent's household. Aged 28, she moved to the village of Tilonia where her husband was working. Tilonia was a small village located in Rajasthan, 100 km away from the capital of Jaipur, where her husband had established the Barefoot College in 1972 for social and economic development of the village. He had recruited many individuals from top tier educational institutions and it would later come to be known as one of India's most professional development organisations.

In Tilonia, there was a significant shift in lifestyle and outlook for Roy. There were no pipelines for water services and finding drinking water was a hazard. The village did not have electricity or access to any public transportation or banking services, she had to walk for miles to reach the location. Roy's upbringing like, much of India's urban upper middle class, had taken place entirely in urban areas and in near complete ignorance of rural life. She had come into contact with villagers during her time in the civil services but due to her position as an administrative officer, there were barriers in communication and her understanding of socioeconomic realities in the villages. She with her husband moved into an accommodation which hosted seventeen other employees of the Barefoot College, including three graduates of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and three geologists from the Indian Institute of Technology. The employees shared household and organisational duties among themselves which included everything from cooking to setting up facilities for children's education and income-generating programs for villagers. Over the course of the years, Barefoot College would various technologies including solar power in a number of villages and educate rural residents on the concept and operation of these sophisticated systems.

Initially, Roy experienced resistance in finding acceptance in the village. Her attempts at bringing new ideas about childbearing and schooling were dismissed by the women there. Though the attitude was welcomed by her as she was no longer being treated as an authority but rather as an equal. According to her, it is essential for deprived people to be the agents of their own change and that her job was to serve as a catalyst rather than a leader. In addition, there was hostility from the more prosperous section of villagers, due to her affinity towards the weavers and leather workers, who belonged to dalit castes. Eventually, an old woman named Dhani Bhua helped her in getting adjusted with village life. Once her presence as was accepted, she came to frequently socialise with the women there and became sought after for advise in issues such as the use of birth control. Roy herself developed a personal preference for an ascetic lifestyle reinforced by a belief in the Gandhian ideal that one must change oneself to bring change. During her time in Tilonia, she experienced a change in perspective. Roy started regarding facets such as illiteracy and lack of education as a skill disadvantage rather than that of ability or intelligence, and recognised that they had a deep knowledge in their field of occupation that others did not posses including those which are considered unskilled labour. Roy describes Tilonia to have been her real alma mater and the villagers to be better teachers than those in Delhi and at the IAS. According to her, the IAS training was inadequate for understanding the complexities of socioeconomic change that were occurring in the rural areas, and that the villages represented neither the romantic notions of a rural life nor the simplistic view of a sexist caste-ridden conservative society, both common stereotypes among the urban well-to-do population.

The Barefoot College operated as an apolitical service aimed at economic self sufficiency and acted as an alternative for the unavailable government services. The organisation was funded by a number of international and national agencies such as the Sir Ratan Tata Trust and Oxfam, as well as the governments of Rajasthan and India. It developed a parallel bureaucracy constrained by profit margins and grant specifications. Their reach was limited and Roy eventually started questioning whether they were being effective in enacting any significant change and promoting grassroots empowerment. Though the organisation would sometimes encourage legal action, it was averse of any mass mobilisation confronting the government. In 1981, a revenue collector requested Roy to help end a labor strike in the neighbouring village of Harmara. Led by a dalit women named Naurti Bai, the strike had gathered 500 minimum wage workers who refused to return to work or accept any payment until their full wages including pending dues were paid. She convinced the strikers to end their protest and in the process befriended Naurti, from whom she came to learn about the effectiveness of using information in mobilising people. The Barefoot College initiated the Sanjit Roy vs. the Government of Rajasthan case over the non-payment of minimum wages, while Roy attempted to raise the issue of reforming the organisation into one that could support collective action. Several meetings were held over the following period that led to disagreements among the members and no breakthroughs were achieved. In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the workers in the minimum wage case, in what was considered a landmark judgement. Roy decided to leave the Barefoot College in the same year, in search of a different platform for grassroots empowerment in rural India.

Foundation of the MKSS (1983–1996)

Between 1983 and 1987, Roy moved around working with various tribal and women's group in Rajasthan and neighbouring states, looking to encourage collective action. She remained associated with the Barefoot College and would return to Tilonia to help out with their work from time to time. In 1985, she was invited to attend the international women's conference in Nairobi, Kenya but she did not attend it and instead organised a mahila mela (women's festival) in Rajasthan to act as its counterpart, with the view of starting a forum for rural women as the international women's movement was largely centered on middle class urban women. The mela was organised with the help of the Barefoot College, Seva Mandir and the Institute of Development Studies. It was the first women's rights congregation in India which focused on poor rural women and saw the attendance of thousands from all across the country. The festival featured games, competitions, arts and crafts, workshops and socio-political discussions, and concluded with a prabhat pheri (morning invocation walk), a protest demonstration in the nearby town of Kishangarh against the rape of a 11 year old child. The mela was the first instance of a public discussion on violence against women in that area and marked a shift in attitude where the onus for shame was laid on the perpetrators than the victims.

Right to Information movement (1996–2006)

The MKSS began by fighting for fair and equal wages for workers which shaped and evolved into a struggle for the enactment of India's Right to Information Act. Aruna Roy is a leader of the Right to Information movement in India through the MKSS and the National Campaign for People's Right to Information (NCPRI), which was finally successful with the passage of the Right to Information Act in 2005.

Aruna Roy has been at the forefront of a number of campaigns for the rights of the poor and the marginalised. These have included, most prominently, the Right to Information, the Right to Work (the NREGA), and the Right to Food. More recently, she has been involved with the campaign for universal, non-contributory pension for unorganised sector workers as a member of the Pension Parishad and the NCPRI for the passage and enactment of the Whistleblower Protection Law and Grievance Redress Act.

She served as a member of the National Advisory Council (NAC) until 2006 when she resigned.

Later career (2006–present)

She was also appointed the 2016 professor of practice in global governance at McGill University, in Montreal.

In 2018, along with the MKSS collective, Roy published a book chronicling the history of the Right to Information movement in India titled The RTI Story: Power to the People.

Honours and awards

With the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, Aruna Roy was awarded the Times Fellowships Award for 1991 for her work for rural workers rights to social justice and creative development. In 2000, she received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership. In 2010 she received the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Award for Excellence in Public Administration, Academia and Management. In 2011, she was named as one of the hundred most influential people in the world by Time magazine. In September 2017 the Times of India listed Roy as one of the 11 Human Rights Activists Whose Life Mission Is To Provide Others with a Dignified Life.

Selected works

Academic

• Roy, Aruna (1974). "Realistic Motif in the Ideology of Tagore". Indian Literature. 17 (1/2). Sahitya Akademi: 52–58. ISSN 0019-5804. JSTOR 23329847.
• Roy, Aruna (1976). "Tagore's Concept of Love". Indian Literature. 19 (5). Sahitya Akademi: 103–113. ISSN 0019-5804. JSTOR 24157345.
• Roy, Aruna (1980). "Schools and Communities: An Experience in Rural India". International Review of Education / Internationale Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft / Revue Internationale de l'Éducation. 26 (3). Springer: 369–378. Bibcode:1980IREdu..26..369R. doi:10.1007/BF01427501. ISSN 0020-8566. JSTOR 3443814. S2CID 144989143.
• Roy, Aruna (2015). "Determining destinies: building transparency and accountability through citizen involvement". In Mudgal, Vipul (ed.). Claiming India from Below: Activism and Democratic Transformation. Routledge. pp. 261–276. doi:10.4324/9781315665467-27 ( (inactive $1) 11 November 2021). ISBN 978-1-315-66546-7.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2021 (link)
• Roy, Aruna; Dav, Eacute; K, S. (2020). "Analysing Kerala's Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic". Economic and Political Weekly. World Health Organization.

Non-fiction

• Roy, Aruna; MKSS Collective (2018). The RTI Story: Power to the People. Roli Books. ISBN 978-81-937049-1-2.
• Dey, Nikhil; Roy, Aruna; Swamy, Rakshita (2020). We the People: Establishing Rights and Deepening Democracy. Rethinking India Series. Penguin Random House. ISBN 978-93-5305-877-7.

Miscellaneous

• Mittal, Sunil; Roy, Aruna (2011). "Livelihoods and Job Creation". In Nilekani, Rohini (ed.). Uncommon Ground: Dialogues between Business and Social Leaders. Penguin Books Limited. ISBN 978-81-8475-584-8.
• Roy, Aruna (2017). "An Indian Feminist at Seventy". In Razdan, Nidhi (ed.). Left, Right and Centre: The Idea of India. Penguin Random House. ISBN 978-93-86651-58-7.
• Roy, Aruna; Dey, Nikhil; Kashyap, Praavita (2018). "Allowing people to shape our democratic future". In Kothari, Ashish; Joy, K. J. (eds.). Alternative Futures: India Unshackled. AuthorsUpFront. pp. 120–137. ISBN 978-93-87280-09-0.

Further reading

• Menon, Ritu (2002). Women Who Dared. National Book Trust, India. ISBN 81-237-3856-0.
• Gupta, Indra (2004). India's 50 Most Illustrious Women. New Delhi: Icon Publications. ISBN 9788188086030.
• Bail, S; Bansal, S (2004). Icons of social change. New Delhi: Puffin Books.

External links

• The idea of India by Aruna Roy – Mint
• The Rediff Interview/ Aruna Roy – Rediff.com