Aruna Roy

Aruna Roy (née Jayaram, born 26 may 1946) is an Indian social activist, professor, union organiser and retired IAS officer. She was 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. He was sent to Shantiniketan and later became a lawyer by profession. She and her siblings were encouraged to be critical thinkers, discouraged from harboring any form of prejudice around ethnicity, caste or class and taught to respect people regardless of their social standing. 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 married a batch mate of hers from University of Delhi, Sanjit Roy in 1970.

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 of 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 among 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 parents' household. Aged 28, she moved to the village of Tilonia where her husband was working.

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. 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 advice on issues such as the use of birth control. 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 possess 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. 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. The mela was the first instance of a public discussion on violence against women in that area and is described to have marked a shift in attitude where the onus for shame was laid on the perpetrators rather than the victims.

In the summer of 1987, Roy accompanied by like-minded associates from the Barefoot College, moved to the village of Devdungri, 180 km away from Tilonia, with the intention of building a new organisation. Devdungri was chosen as their home base, as one of them, Shankar Singh had a relative who owned an unoccupied house in the village and was willing to grant it to them. Roy, another activist Nikhil Dey, Singh and his wife and children were the first to move into the house. It was a two roomed hut made of mud and stone hut and was in disrepair for years. The group expanded the house, building a living room, a kitchen and an additional room using traditional methods that they had learned from labourers back at the Barefoot College. Roy had used her connections to take a grant of ₹30,000 from the Ministry of Human Resource Development for studying the participation rates of the rural poor in the government's poverty alleviation programs. The success established the credibility of the trio and acted as a demonstration of the effectiveness of collective action that they had been trying to encourage in the area. Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey and Shankar Singh were the three primary activists of the organisation and formed its core leadership. The foundation of the organisation was laid in 1987 when the three activists had first started organising the rural poor in the village of Devdungri. Formed to operate as a non-party political organisation that could mobilise collective action in order to secure the rights of the rural poor, it was structured as a non-bureaucratic and non-hierarchical organisation with no designated leader. It was not registered as a society or a trade union and had no formal constitution. It did not have any membership fees and raised funds solely through contributions from volunteers and supporters, maintaining a policy of not accepting donations from governments, corporations or any institutional funders. Membership relied on participation and developed into four layers.

Later career (2004–present) 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. 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.

In December 2024, Aruna Roy was included on the BBC's 100 Women list.

Selected works

Academic

Non-fiction

Miscellaneous