The little battles: Aruna Roy at 80 and the long slog of Indian transparency

On 26 June 2026, Scroll.in published a video portrait of Aruna Roy on her eightieth birthday. The veteran right-to-information campaigner was filmed reflecting on what she called the "little battles" — the small, technical, frequently demoralising fights to keep the Right to Information (RTI) Act alive in a country whose central government has spent the better part of a decade quietly tightening the leash on it. The piece is short. The argument it makes, by implication, is large: that India's transparency architecture is being hollowed out one amendment at a time, and that the people who built it are running out of time to defend it.

Roy is one of the architects of the 2005 RTI Act, the law that turned citizens into auditors of the state and that, for a decade, was held up as a model for the rest of South Asia. Twenty-one years later, the law is intact on paper and weakened in practice. The framing that emerges from Scroll's profile, read against a steady drumbeat of regulatory changes and a parallel conversation about wartime procurement reform in Ukraine, is not about one country: it is about what happens when a state decides that information is a security liability rather than a public good, and what ordinary civic infrastructure looks like when it tries to resist.

A birthday, and an inventory

The Scroll profile is a conversation, not an investigation. Roy does not deliver a sweeping indictment; she delivers an inventory. The law still exists. The commissioners still hear appeals. The activist bench that pushed the law through Parliament in 2005 — Roy, her late husband Shankar Singh, and the wider Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) network in Rajasthan — is still alive, though visibly thinner. The victories are still there: ration cards tracked, pension scams exposed, forests re-mapped against paper records. The "little battles" Roy names are precisely these — the case-by-case slog that does not move markets or command prime-time, and that nevertheless holds the line.

What the conversation makes unavoidable, by tone if not by explicit claim, is the contrast between the civil society that fought for the law and the administrative state that now administers it. The RTI Act, in its original draft, was a procedural statute with teeth. Successive amendments — and there have been several — have made the commissioner's tenure contingent on central government pleasure, narrowed the categories of information that can be disclosed without reclassification, and changed the rules on appeals in ways that activists say amount to a tax on persistence. The structure is familiar across the region: the statute survives, the institution is hollowed, the caseload piles up.

A reader looking for a smoking-gun memo or a single named act of sabotage will not find one in the Scroll video. That is the point. Roy's framing is that there is no single act. There is drift.

The Ukrainian frame, by way of contrast

A separate piece of evidence landed on the same day from an unexpected direction. On 26 June 2026, a post circulated on X by the Polish economics account @ekonomat_pl quoted Ukrainian voices describing a different kind of "little battle": the procurement reform effort inside the war economy. The quoted material — translated into English in the post — has senior Ukrainian figures arguing that even after billions of dollars in loans and the large-scale purchase of modern equipment, soldiers are still being trained to a doctrine that no longer matches what the front line actually looks like. The complaints are tactical: too much kit, not enough adaptation; too much procurement paperwork, not enough doctrinal rewriting.

The juxtaposition with Roy is not the journalist's. It is the world's. Two very different states — one under full-scale invasion, the other at peace but politically brittle — are both trying to close the gap between the institution they have and the institution they need. In Kyiv, the gap is between a Soviet-legacy training culture and a drone-and-electronic-warfare front line. In New Delhi, the gap is between a transparency law drafted for a different era of politics and a security state that has decided openness is overhead.

The shared problem is older than either country: institutions built for one set of pressures being asked to absorb another. Where Ukraine is rebuilding military doctrine under live fire, India is renegotiating the boundary between the citizen and the file without firing a shot. The mechanisms differ. The pathology — drift dressed as modernisation — does not.

What "little battles" actually means

Roy's phrase deserves unpacking. The RTI regime in India has always depended on what is, in effect, volunteer labour. Commissioners are overstretched. The backlog runs into years. A petitioner who files a request and then waits through two appeal cycles is, in most cases, a retiree, a journalist, a union worker, or a graduate student with a specific grievance. The system is not designed to scale; it is designed to embarrass. When embarrassment stops being politically costly, the system loses its grip.

That is what the post-2015 amendments have done, critics argue. By reframing the tenure of state and central information commissioners and by tightening the rules on what counts as a legitimate disclosure request, the amendments have raised the cost of an RTI petition without ever formally repealing the right. The activist answer, as Roy describes it, is to file anyway, in greater numbers, and to absorb the friction. The logic is identical to what the @ekonomat_pl post describes from Ukraine: the rules do not match the environment, so the people inside the rules keep filing, keep litigating, keep insisting.

This is where the article's understated heroism lives. There is no grand confrontation in the Scroll profile. There is no leaked document, no resignation in protest, no cabinet meeting captured on a hot mic. There is an eighty-year-old activist sitting in front of a camera and explaining that the answer to a years-long squeeze is to keep using the tools that are still, technically, available. It is a deeply unfashionable claim at a moment when the dominant mode of civic action across the region is the street, the strike, the viral post. Roy is arguing for the spreadsheet.

Counter-narrative: the state's case, taken seriously

No serious reading of the RTI story can pretend the state has no argument. The volume of requests has grown, and so has the fraction of requests that look less like auditing and more like harassment — repeated filings against individual officers, requests designed to leak into the press, and an expanding cottage industry of paid RTI agents who promise access in exchange for fees. The state argues, with some evidence behind it, that the original 2005 architecture did not anticipate the scale and that the cost — in officer-hours, in litigation, in security review — is now out of proportion to the public-good yield.

The structural counter from activists is that harassment is itself a measure of an effective law, and that the answer to misuse is appellate speed, not the dilution of the underlying right. That is the live disagreement, and it has not been resolved by either side citing evidence the other accepts. The dominant Indian wire framing — that the amendments are necessary reforms against misuse — and the activist framing — that the amendments are a slow repeal dressed as housekeeping — are both coherent. What separates them is a prior question: whether the right to know is a default or a privilege.

That prior question is not unique to India. It is the question that, in different vocabulary, sits behind the European Union's fights over platform transparency, the United States' arguments over classified procurement data, and Ukraine's ongoing reform of wartime contracting. The form varies. The political substance does not: in every case, a state is being asked to choose between information as a public good and information as an administrative risk.

Stakes, and what the next two years look like

The stakes are concrete. A further narrowing of the RTI regime would not, by itself, change Indian democracy overnight. It would change who gets to litigate, who gets audited, and who gets to read the file before the file is moved. The RTI is most useful not at the centre but at the periphery — at the ration shop, the panchayat, the district hospital, the forest clearance. It is the tool that makes the periphery visible. The slow narrowing of the tool, activists argue, makes the periphery darker.

The forward view is not encouraging. The post-2015 amendments have held; the appellate infrastructure is underfunded; the political incentive to expand transparency is low. What Roy's Scroll appearance underlines is that the defence is not going to come from a single court ruling or a single political moment. It is going to come from the cumulative weight of small petitions, small wins, and a stubborn insistence that the file is the citizen's.

What remains uncertain

The Scroll video does not name the specific amendments under contention, and it does not quantify the appellate backlog. The piece is a portrait, not an audit. That is its editorial strength and its evidence ceiling. A reader who wants a number — how many requests are pending, what fraction of central commissioner's benches are vacant, how the average appeal duration has shifted since 2019 — will have to look elsewhere. The video's contribution is to keep the human actor in the frame, and to remind the reader that the human actor is eighty and still showing up.

What the sources do not disagree about is whether the law is being administered as its drafters intended. They disagree about whether that matters.

This piece was framed against two same-day items: Scroll.in's video profile of Aruna Roy and an X post by @ekonomat_pl quoting Ukrainian voices on procurement and doctrine reform. Monexus treated the two pieces as a single editorial prompt about institutional drift under pressure — one country under siege, one country at peace, both asking what their institutions are actually for.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://x.com/ekonomat_pl/status/
• https://x.com/sknerus_/status/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Information_Act,_2005
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazdoor_Kisan_Shakti_Sangathan
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aruna_Roy
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Information_Commission
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTI_Act_amendments