"The project was founded in July 2020, when at the time I was frustrated by the lack of communication from state institutes. I had sent several letters and emails to a number of institutions and received no reply from any of them. In response to my frustration, I was encouraged by a dear friend to try my luck with an RTI request and so I did. To my surprise, all of the institutions that had previously failed to respond to any of my other communications, acknowledged the receipt of the requests within a couple of days and eventually provided the information that was requested for. The detailed responses I received inspired me to explore RTI further, and the seeds for this project were planted.

Eventually, I stumbled upon Section 37 of the Right to Information Act which prescribes areas of proactive disclosure which have to be published by each and every state institute in the country. The section outlined several key pieces of information that I was genuinely curious to find out about – especially the subsection regarding details of the individual remuneration and benefits received by state employees. However, even though the information was required to be proactively disclosed, literally NONE of the state institutes had made this information available despite the RTI Act being in force for over seven years at that point.

So instead of waiting for institutes to come to their senses and disclose the information on their own time, I decided to force their hand by submitting RTI requests for the salary details which they were unwilling to proactively disclose. While there was a lot of hesitation in the initial stages of trying to procure this information, the law was on my side and eventually most state institutes had no choice but to provide the information. However, as institutions were still unwilling to publish the information on their own websites, I started sharing them on my own social media channels and eventually made the zinmaadhaaru website to ease the access to information."