In the sixteenth episode, I speak to Himanshu Jha, Lecturer and Research Fellow, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University on his recent book Capturing Institutional Change: The Case of the Right to Information Act in India published by Oxford University Press in 2020. The book presents an alternate narrative of India’s 2005 Right to Information (RTI) Act that transformed how the Indian state operated. Moving beyond narratives that stress the role of the social movements and political opportunities created by the first UPA government, Jha argues that the RTI Act was a result of an incremental, slow-moving process of 'ideas' that emerged endogenously from within the state since 1947. The conversation begins by exploring how Jha became interested in issues related to transparency in India and what the Right to Information Act (RTI) is. The discussion then considers how the norm of secrecy became ingrained within the Indian state at all levels. The key part of the conversation explores why the Indian state, penetrated by vested interests, changed the legal framework of the information regime, which could be used to highlight and expose how institutions governed. Jha reveals how his ideational argument pushes back against interest-based arguments that claim various social groups pushed the RTI through institutional channels to advance their interests; Jha argues that these groups mattered but their advocacy must be placed in the context of state discussions on transparency that go back decades. The conversation ends by assessing the current state of the RTI and whether it has weakened and the tradeoff between transparency, which the RTI advances, and privacy.

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