RTI Is agRawal’s 24x7 passIon
Although Subhash Agrawal has been in the news for over a decade for exposing big scams through his RTI skills, not many people know about his personal life. His story began when, as a young student at the Delhi College of Engineering (that time at Kashmere Gate) in 1967, a DTC bus conductor refused to give him a ticket after pocketing a 10 paise fare. Agitated, he wrote his first “Letter to the Editor” to the Hindi Hindustan, describing the incident. Two days later, the letter was published. When he went to college, he saw a jeep carrying some persons in khaki coming inside. Moments later, a peon came looking for him. Thinking that the “police” had come to arrest him for complaining against the DTC conductor, he ran home. The next day, the principal summoned him and told him that the DTC officials had brought the “conductor” as he wanted to apologise. Realising the power of his letter to the newspaper, Agrawal began writing one letter daily to various newspapers on a wide range of subjects affecting the common man. Within a few years, he became a Guinness record holder in this field, breaking a Pakistani’s record. Today, his wife Madhu (66) is also a Guinness record holder in the “Letters to the Editor” category. When the RTI Act was passed in 2005, Agrawal began filing one application daily to find out the truth about various scams that hit the UPA’s two-term regime, whether it was 2G or the Commonwealth Games. Soon after their marriage in 1975, Agrawal and his wife had taken a bold decision of not to have a child. The cheating in the family’s wholesale cloth business by his kin made him rise above the materialistic world, and he started liking the philosophy of the Parsi way of life—work for the society, and not for yourself. His wife supported him in adopting the “no-child” policy. From business, he began sparing a few hours daily to pursue his RTI queries. Today, RTI is his 24x7 passion. In his opinion, “No subject is too trivial—small-small corrections in the society can make a big difference.”