On Monday, 22 July 2013, a district judge in Odisha walked ten kilometres, there and back, through hill country in Rayagada district. Two streams swollen by monsoon rain lay across his path. His name was Sarat Chandra Mishra, and he was headed for a Dongria Kondh village in the Sabapadar area, about 85 kilometres from the district headquarters. The meeting began under a polythene sheet. The villagers told him they were ready to give their lives to protect Niyamraja, the deity they believe lives on the Niyamgiri hills.

The judge had not come to settle a quarrel between two parties. The Supreme Court of India had ruled on 18 April 2013 that the gram sabhas, the village assemblies of the area, must be asked a single question. Would bauxite mining on the Niyamgiri hills violate their religious, cultural and community rights? (Orissa Mining Corporation v. Ministry of Environment and Forest, 2013). The mining company’s officials and those of the state mining corporation were kept away from the venues. Between July and August, the twelve gram sabhas the state convened all rejected the proposal. In January 2014, the Union environment ministry refused the final forest clearance for the mine, citing the Supreme Court-mandated process.

It is tempting to file this under triumph. In part, it was one. But the scene raises a more uncomfortable question. Why did it take a Supreme Court order and a ten-kilometre walk before anyone formally asked these villagers what they thought? The Dongria Kondh, a community of roughly 8,000 people, had resisted the project for nearly a decade. They live in a republic whose Constitution has granted every adult citizen a vote since 1950. Holding a vote, the Niyamgiri story suggests, is not the same as being heard.

This article follows that difference through four cases from India and one from Ireland. They are the Niyamgiri hearings, the village campaign that produced the Right to Information Act, a national digital consultation on internet pricing, and the record of Parliament’s own scrutiny of bills. Along the way I separate what the record documents from what I think it means. I also try to be fair to governments, which cannot say yes to everyone.

The vote is not the whole story.

No serious democrat doubts that elections matter. They are how power changes hands without violence, and they give every adult an equal formal stake. But an election is a blunt instrument. A voter chooses one candidate, bundled with a party, a manifesto and a thousand unlisted future decisions. A result tells you who won. It does not tell you what the winner is supposed to do about a mining lease, a pricing rule or a ration card.

The political scientist Robert Dahl put the point at the opening of his classic study Polyarchy. A democracy, he wrote, is distinguished by the continuing responsiveness of government to the preferences of its citizens. The word that matters there is continuing. Hannah Pitkin made a related argument in her study of representation. Representing someone is not merely being chosen by them, nor merely resembling them. It means acting in their interest in a way that stays answerable to them. The economist Albert Hirschman gave the idea a handy vocabulary. Dissatisfied members of any organisation can exit, or they can use voice, which means complaining, petitioning and protesting in the hope of change. A citizen cannot exit a country as easily as a customer exits a shop. For most people, voice is all that is left.

What “heard” would actually mean.

“Being heard” is a vague phrase, so I will make it testable. What follows is my own working framework, built from the literature above and not a standard definition. A citizen is heard when four things are true.
Access. There is a route by which her concern can reach a decision-maker.

Recognition. Her claim is treated as the kind of thing that counts, and she is not dismissed as noise or as an interest too small to matter.
Response. Something changes, or she is told why not.
Accountability. If the response is empty, there is some way to press the matter.

Notice that agreement is not on the list. A government can hear a demand and decline it. What it cannot do, if it wants to be called responsive, is leave the demand unrecorded and unanswered.

Distance

Between elections, the main institution that is supposed to hear citizens is the legislature. In India, the clearest record of how Parliament handles its own listening is the data compiled by PRS Legislative Research, an independent research institution. In the 17th Lok Sabha, which sat between June 2019 and February 2024, 16 per cent of Bills were referred to parliamentary committees for detailed scrutiny, a figure PRS notes is lower than in the previous three Lok Sabhas. Business Standard, reporting earlier PRS data, put the equivalent figures at about 71 per cent in the 15th Lok Sabha and 60 per cent in the 14th, with 25 per cent in the 16th.

That is the documented part. Here is the interpretation. Committees matter because they are where a Bill is sometimes opened to outside evidence, such as expert testimony and written submissions from affected groups. A referral rate is therefore a rough proxy for how often the legislature invites the public in. A government can fairly argue that not every Bill needs months of scrutiny, and that urgency and a clear mandate are legitimate reasons to move quickly. The number does not prove bad faith, and I do not claim it does. It does show that, on this measure, the formal channel for hearing citizens on legislation has been used less over time. The citizen who feels distant from lawmaking has some evidence for the feeling.

Who gets through

Distance is not felt equally. The best-known empirical argument that it is not comes from the United States. Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page examined nearly 1,800 policy issues and concluded that the preferences of average citizens had little independent influence on policy once the preferences of economic elites and organised interest groups were taken into account. Their finding has been contested, including on how policy support is measured. Larry Bartels has also documented that elected officials in the US appear more responsive to affluent constituents than to poorer ones. I cite this American work as a hypothesis worth testing elsewhere, not as a verdict on India.

An older strand of research explains why this might happen. Sidney Verba, Kay Schlozman and Henry Brady found that political participation depends heavily on resources: money, time and what they call civic skills, the ability to write a letter, run a meeting or speak persuasively. Those resources are unevenly spread. A drafting committee that invites written comments is, without intending to, favouring people who can write them.

India’s own data show how access to the newer channels of voice is distributed. In the National Family Health Survey of 2019–21, 57.1 per cent of men and 33.3 per cent of women reported having ever used the internet, and the figure for rural women was 24.6 per cent (International Institute for Population Sciences, 2021). The latest round, NFHS-6 for 2023–24, released on 29 May 2026, shows women’s figure rising to 64.3 per cent (Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, 2026, as reported by ETV Bharat, 2026). That is a large shift, and a welcome one. But “ever used the internet” is a low bar. It tells us little about who can read a draft rule, find the right portal, or file a comment in a language they are comfortable in. Closing the access gap is a start. It is not the same as closing the voice gap.

The Niyamgiri villagers fit this pattern in an extreme form. They had little money, little formal schooling by the standards of the offices deciding their future, and no easy route to those offices. What they had was a statute, the Forest Rights Act of 2006, and the organisations that helped them use it.

When villagers read the accounts aloud

Organisation, in other words, is what lets people with few resources get through. India’s best-known example began in a village called Devdungri in Rajasthan. The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) was founded there in 1990 by Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey, Shankar Singh and local villagers, in response to wage theft and corruption in public works. Its central method was the jan sunwai, or public hearing. Official records of local works were obtained, read aloud to assembled villagers, and checked against what the workers themselves knew about who had actually been paid and what had actually been built. Roy’s own history of the campaign traces its roots to 1987.

The campaign did not stop at village exposure. According to the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, the difficulty of getting records out of government reinforced the case for a general law. Rajasthan passed a state right-to-information law in 2000, and Parliament passed the national Right to Information Act in 2005. It received Presidential assent on 15 June and came fully into force on 12 October 2005.

The documented chain is clear: a local grievance, a method for converting private knowledge into public evidence, a movement, a state law, a national law. My interpretation is that the MKSS did more than win a statute. It built a repeatable way for citizens to access information, secured recognition of villagers as legitimate auditors of public money, and created a basis for accountability. In my four-part test, it supplied three things that elections alone do not.

A million emails, one question

The digital promise is that the same thing could happen faster and at scale. India’s net neutrality consultation shows both what is possible and what goes wrong.

In December 2015, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) issued a consultation paper on differential pricing for data services, essentially whether telecom providers should be allowed to charge different prices for different websites and apps. Facebook, whose Free Basics programme offered free access to a limited set of services, ran a public campaign asking users to email the regulator in support. Net neutrality advocates mobilised in the opposite direction. By the extended deadline of 7 January 2016, TRAI reported receiving approximately 24 lakh (2.4 million) comments, most of them template responses that did not engage the specific questions in the paper. TRAI’s own tally attributed more than 13.5 lakh to a single campaign site and several lakhs more to other template channels.

The regulator then did something that made some participants angry. In a letter to Facebook, TRAI described the exercise as a consultation and not “a crudely majoritarian orchestrated opinion poll” (as quoted in The Better India, 2016). Facebook, for its part, said more than 11 million people had supported Free Basics and alleged that someone at TRAI had blocked emails from its site, an allegation reported by Scroll and other outlets. TRAI counted about 1.89 million Free Basics-linked comments, and the numbers remained disputed. In February 2016, TRAI issued regulations prohibiting discriminatory tariffs for data services based on content. Telecom operators had favoured differential pricing, and net neutrality advocates opposed it. So the regulator’s decision matched neither side’s full wishes in a simple way, and it explained its reasoning.

What should we make of this? I would resist the easy conclusion on either side. One reading says the regulator rightly refused to count copies of one message as many voices. Another says that deciding which voices count is itself a power, and it should be exercised by transparent criteria, not discretion. Both readings hold something true. The deeper lesson is that digital platforms cut the cost of speaking while also cutting the cost of manufacturing the appearance of speech. A thousand identical emails and one reasoned objection are different kinds of input, and an institution that wants to listen must be able to tell them apart without simply preferring whoever is more fluent.

The difficult balance

None of this means governments should do what the loudest group demands. Representative democracy exists precisely because decisions must weigh competing interests, limited public money, expert knowledge, constitutional limits and the interests of people who are not in the room. A government that obeyed every petition would not be more democratic. It would be incoherent, and probably unjust to the people who did not petition.

Niyamgiri itself shows the complexity. The Odisha government convened gram sabhas in twelve villages, and the Union tribal affairs ministry and activists said that far more villages were affected and should have been consulted. An office-bearer of a local development body alleged that villagers had been misled by NGOs, a claim that was disputed. The mine was to feed a refinery at Lanjigarh that could not run at full capacity without it. Refusing the mine imposed real costs on the company and on people whose livelihoods depended on it. My point is not that the villagers were wrong. It is that “being heard” does not settle who wins. It settles whether the decision is made with the affected people’s reasons on the table.

Some democracies have tried to build that into the design. Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly of 2016–18 brought together 99 citizens chosen at random to broadly reflect the population by age, gender, social class and geography, together with a chair who was a Supreme Court judge. Its terms of reference required the government to respond to each recommendation in the Oireachtas, and one of its recommendations led to a national referendum in May 2018. One can hold any view on the subject it considered and still find the design interesting. Ordinary people were given time, evidence and a guaranteed official reply. No design is perfect, and an assembly of 99 is not a replacement for elections. But it shows that hearing citizens is partly a matter of institutional engineering, not just goodwill.

The hill, again

Go back to the judge on the path. It would be easy to say the lesson of Niyamgiri is that courts rescue democracy. I think that gets it slightly wrong. The Supreme Court acted because a statute, the Forest Rights Act, had given gram sabhas a role, because organisations and litigants had pressed the matter for years, and because a ministry then acted on the result. It took a chain of institutions and a decade of effort for one question to reach one set of villages.

The deeper reflection is about what we think citizens are. If they are voters who choose representatives periodically and then go home, a democracy can be judged mostly by its elections. If they are participants in a continuing relationship with the state, then a democracy must also be judged by what happens on the ordinary days between elections. That means whether a Bill is opened to outside evidence, whether a consultation is read for its arguments, whether a village can obtain the muster roll, and whether anyone climbs the hill. None of this is a case against elections or against any government of any party. It is a measure that applies to all of them.

The judge climbed the hill once, and it made the news. The harder test of a democracy is whether it can build ways of asking, in ordinary times and with ordinary people, so that no one has to wait for a court order to be heard.

References:

1. Consistent author-date style. Items marked were retrieved via news or archive pages. Primary documents should be pulled and checked before submission, as noted in the fact-check checklist.
2. AFP (2013) ‘Indian tribals reject Vedanta’s mining proposal in sacred hills’, AFP, 29 July.
3. Bartels, L.M. (2008) Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
4. Business Standard (2016) ‘Net-neutrality vs differential pricing: The story so far’, 8 February.
5. Business Standard (2023) ‘Parliamentary standing committees that scrutinise Bills get less to do’, 29 August.
6. Business Today (2013) ‘Tribals in Orissa’s Niyamgiri hills reject Vedanta’s bauxite mining project’.
7. Citizens’ Assembly (Ireland) (2016) 2016–2018 Citizens’ Assembly: Terms of Reference. Available at citizensassembly.ie.
8. Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (2005) ‘State Level RTI: Rajasthan’. Available at humanrightsinitiative.org.
9. Council of Europe (n.d.) ‘Ireland: Public debate concerning abortion and the repeal of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution (2016)’. Available at coe.int.
10. Dahl, R.A. (1971) Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. New Haven: Yale University Press.
11. Deccan Herald (2014) ‘Environment ministry rejects Vedanta’s Niyamgiri project’, 12 January.
12. Doyle, O. (2018) ‘Shaping Public Debate: An Introduction to the Citizens’ Assembly’, IACL-AIDC Blog, 19 November.
13. Down To Earth (2013) ‘Jerapa becomes 12th village to reject Vedanta’.
14. Enns, P.K. (2015) ‘Relative Policy Support and Coincidental Representation’, Perspectives on Politics, 13(4).
15. ETV Bharat (2026) ‘Women using internet nearly doubled in India, finds NFHS-6’, 30 May.
16. Gilens, M. and Page, B.I. (2014) ‘Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens’, Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), pp. 564–581.
17. Hirschman, A.O. (1970) Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
18. India Environment Portal (2013a) ‘Palli sabha rejects bauxite mining in Niyamgiri hills’, 22 July (news clipping; original outlet to be confirmed).
19. India Environment Portal (2013b) ‘First gram sabha nixes mining in Niyamgiri’, 18 July (news clipping; original outlet to be confirmed).
20. India Environment Portal (2013c) ‘Worshipping Niyamraja our birthright, say Dongria Kondhs’, 24 July (news clipping; original outlet to be confirmed).
21. International Institute for Population Sciences and Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (2021) National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), 2019–21: India Fact Sheet. Mumbai: IIPS.
22. Mainstream Weekly (2018) ‘People’s Movement and the Story of the RTI’ (review of Roy, 2018).
23. Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (2026) National Family Health Survey (NFHS-6), 2023–24 fact sheets, released 29 May 2026.
24. MKSS (n.d.) ‘About us’, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan. Available at mkssindia.org.
25. Orissa Mining Corporation v. Ministry of Environment and Forest and Others, Supreme Court of India, decided 18 April 2013.
26. Pitkin, H.F. (1967) The Concept of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press.
27. PRS Legislative Research (2024) Vital Stats: Functioning of the 17th Lok Sabha. New Delhi: PRS.
28. Roy, A. (2018) The RTI Story: Power to the People. New Delhi: Roli Books.
29. Scroll. in (2016) ‘Facebook alleges TRAI blocked emails supporting Free Basics’, January.
30. The Better India (2016) ‘TRAI refuses to bow down to Facebook on Free Basics. Here’s its latest letter to the giant’.
31. The Hindu (2013a) ‘Third gram sabha too rejects mining project in Niyamgiri’, 23 July.
32. The Hindu (2014) ‘Posco cleared, Vedanta loses bid for Niyamgiri project’, 11 January.
33. The Quint (2016) ‘Facebook alleges TRAI unsubscribed to its mail on net neutrality’.
34. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (2016a) Comments received from stakeholders towards the Consultation Paper on ‘Differential Pricing for Data Services’, 9 January. New Delhi: TRAI.
35. Verba, S., Schlozman, K.L. and Brady, H.E. (1995) Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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