State tends to side with vested interest: Ramesh

New Delhi: State always tends to be with the “vested interest” in the conflict between government and the “change agents”, Union Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh said today. “There is an inherent element of conflict between the change agents and the government. Nature of the state is such that when it is confronted with the people who are taking on the state authority or taking on the vested interest, the state prefers to be on the side of the vested interest,” Ramesh said.[caption id=“attachment_332046” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“State reforms. Image courtesy PIB”]  [/caption] Addressing a gathering to honour some of these change agents from various parts of the country, Ramesh said, “The only antidote to that is media exposure. The only antidote to that is greater transparency, greater accountability, greater openness, so that the state is held accountable.” Referring to various incidents where RTI activists were killed for demanding information from the government, he favoured greater accountability and media exposure to tackle the issue of state acting against the change agents. “You can see this in the RTI activists getting killed routinely now. State after state, RTI activists are not only threatened they are actually being killed. This is a very important point, state authority against the change agents,” he said. He further elaborated that the term ‘state’ here includes government at all the levels. “By the way the state here means at all levels. It can be the Central government, it can be the state government and it can be the local government, it can be the Gram Panchayat, Zila Parishad,” Ramesh said. The programme was also attended by BJP spokesperson Nirmala Sitharaman, social activist and National Advisory Council (NAC) member Aruna Roy and sociologist Dipankar Gupta. PTI