Starting from a tiny village in the deserts of Rajasthan in the 1980s, Aruna Roy began a long campaign to

bring transparency to India's notoriously corrupt bureaucracy. Its signal achievement is the 2005 Right to

Information (RTI) Act, a law that has given the nation's poor a powerful tool to fight for their rights and has

influenced similar measures in other countries. It has also inspired thousands of RTI activists, who have

exposed everything from land scams to bank embezzlement to the misuse of public funds meant for the

poor. Since then, Roy, 64, has helped shape an ambitious new rural jobs program and a food-security bill

thatwillcomebeforeParliamentthisyear.ManysocialactivistsclamorforIndiatodomoreforthe

dispossessed. A former civil servant, Roy doesn't just condemn a broken system; she changes it.