Aruna Roy’s memoir ‘The Personal is Political’: The transformative power of empathy and commitment

I was first introduced to Aruna Roy was during my undergraduate studies. Our professor began a lecture on the Right to Information Act with her life story, and the entire class was awestruck by this woman who had left the civil services to work at the grassroots level for the real people. After joining the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) in 1968, she soon realised that the civil service, which still retained some of its colonial values, was not the place for her. She resigned in 1975 and joined her husband, Bunker Roy, at the Barefoot College Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC) in Tilonia, Rajasthan.

Given that half of my batch, including myself, was preparing for civil services at that time, the story of Aruna Roy was nothing short of a jolt. We couldn’t fathom what we heard and then read. Some of us despised her choice, while others were bubbling with questions. How much easier it would have been to understand her motivations had we had this memoir to turn to at that time. Now, some of my colleagues who teach various political science courses also introduce the RTI Act with her story, and the students still react with the same...

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