Reported by Ibnlive.in.com on Jun 26, 2012
63-year-old fights corruption through RTI queries - India News - IBNLive

New Delhi: Subhash Chandra Agrawal's persistent inquiries have led to the revelation of many a scam. The illegal assets of judges, Lok Sabha speaker Meira Kumar's foreign trips, the former aviation minister's blatant misuse of national carrier Air India, and most recently the Rs 35 lakh toilet row in the Planning Commission premises.


Agrawal wanted to be an IAS officer but was forced into his family's cloth business instead. But that didn't stop his desire to fight corruption. And today Subhash Aggarwal is one of India's leading RTI activists.


Agarwal and his wife Madhu began by writing letters to the editors in 1967. By 2002, he had 3,699 published letters in national newspapers and a berth in the Guinness Book of World Records.


Till date, Agarwal has filed more than 5000 RTIs. His mornings are devoted to gathering news from 6 different newspapers and TV channels, anything RTI-worthy is instantly noted and filed onto his desktop as a query.


A simple man, Agarwal's steely resolve has turned him into a crusader of sorts.


This cloth merchant from Chandhni Chowk has not merely stitched together a yarn of stories, he has single handedly forced the powers that be to either come out clean or weave a defense that has no loopholes. And the message coming out of Subhash Agarwal’s story is that you are never too big or small to bring about a change you want to see.