Capturing Institutional Change: The Case of the Right to Information Act in India

Institutions are norms that undergird organizations and are reflected in laws and practices. Over time, institutions take root and persist as they are path dependent and thus change resistant. Therefore, it is puzzling when institutions change. One such puzzle has been the enactment of the Right to Information (RTI) Act in India in 2005, which brought about institutional change by transforming the ‘information regime’. Why did the government upend the norm of secrecy, which had historically been entrenched within the Indian State? This book uses archival material, internal government documents, and interviews to understand the why and how of institutional change. It demonstrates that the institutional change resulted from ‘ideas’ emerging gradually and incrementally, leading to a ‘tipping point’.

About the IDSA Series: This series interrogates the interplay between globalization, the state, and social forces in the making and un-making of institutions in South Asia. Why do institutions persist and change? Do we need to transcend materialism and dwell in ideas and culture as well to understand why institutions perform and fail?

The first book in the Institutions and Development in South Asia series, this volume studies the historical institutionalism in the information regime in India by presenting an alternative narrative about the evolution of the RTI Act.

Himanshu Jha, Lecturer, Department of Political Science, Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University,Rahul Mukherjee, Director, Department of Political Science, Heidelberg University,Subrata K. Mitra, Professor, Department of Political Science, Heidelberg University,Raghbendra Jha, Executive Director, South Asia Research Centre, Australian National University

Himanshu Jha is with the Department of Political Science, South Asia Institute at the Heidelberg University. Jha's most recent research explores the why, how, and what of institutional change. His current research interests lies in the area of institutional change, governance, distributive politics, state capacity, bureaucratic culture and the politics of climate change.