Democracy In Action

Run by activists who fought for the right to information, Loktantrashala in Bhim, Rajasthan, shows students how laws work on the ground.

- Rosamma Thomas

In 2012, the leaders of the Rajasthan-based non-profit, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) set up a school in Bhim tehsil of Rajasthan. It did not bother with textbooks and timetables. Instead, it set itself a more ambitious goal – to give India’s youth a taste of participatory democracy. Set amongst the brick kilns abundant in this area, the School for Democracy (SFD), or Loktantrashala in Hindi, invited students from across the country to stay for a while, understand community life and the problems of villagers. Over the seven years, hundreds of youths have stayed on its campus of wide spaces and brick-and-Mangloretile structures, contributed to its upkeep and cooked their own meals.

Through interactions with the community around them, they also learnt how well or not some of India’s biggest policies and the laws underpinning them work on the ground.

They explored whether workers registered under the Building and Other Construction Workers’ Act, 1996 really get all the benefits they are entitled to under the law. And while studying the impact of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (MGNREGA), they even picked up shovels and joined the workers in building a stretch of road.