Arvind Kejriwal

Arvind Kejriwal (Hindi: �ɾʋin̪d̪ ked͡ʒɾiːʋaːl born 16 August 1968) is an Indian politician, former bureaucrat, and activist who is the 7th and current Chief Minister of Delhi since February 2015. Currently, he is the national convener of the Aam Aadmi Party, which won the 2015 Delhi Assembly elections with a historic majority, obtaining 67 out of 70 seats. He was also the Chief Minister of Delhi from December 2013 to February 2014, stepping down after 49 days of assuming power. In 2006, Kejriwal was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for his involvement in the ''Parivartan'' movement using right to information legislation in a campaign against government corruption. The same year, after resigning from Government service, he founded the Public Cause Research Foundation to campaign for transparant governance.

Before joining politics, Kejriwal had worked in the Indian Revenue Service. Kejriwal is a mechanical engineer from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur. In 2012, he launched the Aam Aadmi Party, which got 28 seats in the 2013 Delhi Legislative Assembly election. Following the election, he assumed office as the Chief Minister of Delhi and resigned 49 days later over unability to mobilise support for his proposed anti-corruption legislation. After the 2015 elections, AAP registered an unprecedented majority. In 2020, he retained power handsomely despite the Bharatiya Janata Party's mammoth campaigning. His party registered another massive victory in 2022 Punjab Legislative Assembly election. Kejriwal is the most popular Chief Minister on Twitter and dubbed by media as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's biggest challenger.

Early life and education

Kejriwal was born in an Agrawal family in Siwani, Bhiwani district, Haryana on 16 August 1968, the first of the three children of Gobind Ram Kejriwal and Gita Devi. His father was an electrical engineer who graduated from the Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra. Kejriwal spent most of his childhood in north Indian towns such as Sonipat, Ghaziabad and Hisar. He was educated at Campus School in Hisar and at Holy Child School at Sonipat. In 1985, he took the IIT-JEE exam and scored All India Rank (AIR) of 563. He graduated from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, majoring in mechanical engineering.

He joined Tata Steel in 1989 and was posted in Jamshedpur, Bihar. Kejriwal resigned in 1992, having taken leave of absence to study for the Civil Services Examination. He spent some time in Calcutta (present-day Kolkata), where he met Mother Teresa, and volunteered with The Missionaries of Charity and at the Ramakrishna Mission in North-East India and at Nehru Yuva Kendra.

Career

Arvind Kejriwal joined the Indian Revenue Service (IRS) as an Assistant Commissioner of Income Tax in 1995, after qualifying through the Civil Services Examination. In February 2006, he resigned from his position as Joint Commissioner of Income Tax in New Delhi.

In 2012, he launched the Aam Aadmi Party, which won in the 2013 Delhi Legislative Assembly election. Till date Arvind Kejriwal act as a national convenor of AAP.

Anti-corruption activism

Parivartan and Kabira

In December 1999, while still in service with the Income Tax Department, Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia and others found a movement named Parivartan (which means "change"), in the Sundar Nagar area of Delhi. A month later, in January 2000, Kejriwal took a sabbatical from work to focus on Parivartan.

Parivartan addressed citizens' grievances related to Public Distribution System (PDS), public works, social welfare schemes, income tax and electricity. It was not a registered NGO - it ran on individual donations, and was characterised as a ''jan andolan'' ("people's movement") by its members. Later, in 2005, Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia launched Kabir, a registered NGO named after the medieval philosopher Kabir. Like Parivartan, Kabir was also focused on RTI and participatory governance. However, unlike Parivartan, it accepted institutional donations. According to Kejriwal, Kabir was mainly run by Sisodia.

In 2000, Parivartan filed a public interest litigation (PIL) demanding transparency in public dealings of the Income Tax department, and also organised a satyagraha outside the Chief Commissioner's office. Kejriwal and other activists also stationed themselves outside the electricity department, asking visitors not to pay bribes and offered to help them in getting work done for free.

In 2001, the Delhi government enacted a state-level Right To Information (RTI) Act, which allowed the citizens to access government records for a small fee. Parivartan used RTI to help people get their work done in government departments without paying a bribe. In 2002, the group obtained official reports on 68 public works projects in the area, and performed a community-led audit to expose misappropriations worth 7 million in 64 of the projects. On 14 December 2002, Parivartan organized a ''Jan sunvai'' (public hearing), in which the citizens held public officials and leaders accountable for the lack of development in their locality.

In 2003 (and again in 2008), Parivartan exposed a PDS scam, in which ration shop dealers were siphoning off subsidized foodgrains in collusion with civic officials. In 2004, Parivartan used RTI applications to access communication between government agencies and the World Bank, regarding a project for privatization of water supply. Kejriwal and other activists questioned the huge expenditure on the project and argued that it would hike water tariffs ten-fold, thus effectively cutting off the water supply to the city's poor. The project was stalled as a result of Parivartan's activism. Another campaign by Parivartan led to a court order that required private schools, which had received public land at discounted prices, to admit more than 700 poor kids without a fee.

Along with other social activists like Anna Hazare, Aruna Roy and Shekhar Singh, Kejriwal came to be recognized as an important contributor to the campaign for a national-level Right to Information Act (enacted in 2005). He resigned from his job in February 2006, and later that year, he was given the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, for his involvement with Parivartan. The award recognized him for activating the RTI movement at the grassroots and empowering New Delhi's poor citizens to fight corruption.

By 2012, Parivartan was largely inactive. Sundar Nagri, where the movement was concentrated, suffered from irregular water supply, unreliable PDS system and poorly done public works. Calling it "ephemeral and delusionary in nature", Kejriwal noted that Parivartan's success was limited, and the changes brought by it did not last long.

Public Cause Research Foundation

In December 2006, Kejriwal established the Public Cause Research Foundation in December 2006, together with Manish Sisodia and Abhinandan Sekhri. He donated his Ramon Magsaysay Award prize money as a seed fund. Besides the three founders, Prashant Bhushan and Kiran Bedi served as the Foundation's trustees. This new body paid the employees of Parivartan. Kejriwal used the RTI Act in corruption cases in many government departments including the Income Tax Department, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, the Public Distribution System and the Delhi Electricity Board.

Jan Lokpal movement

In 2010, Kejriwal protested against corruption in the Commonwealth Games. He argued that the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) did not have any powers to take any action against the guilty, while CBI was incapable of launching an unbiased investigation against the ministers who controlled it. He advocated appointment of public ombudsman - Lokpal at the Centre and Lokayuktas in states.

In 2011, Kejriwal joined several other activists, including Anna Hazare and Kiran Bedi, to form the India Against Corruption (IAC) group. The IAC demanded enactment of the Jan Lokpal Bill, which would result in a strong ombudsman. The campaign evolved into the 2011 Indian anti-corruption movement. In response to the campaign, the government's advisory body - the National Advisory Council - drafted a Lokpal Bill. However, the NAC's Bill was criticized by Kejriwal and other activists on the grounds that it did not have enough powers to take action against the prime minister, other corrupt officeholders, and the judiciary. The activists also criticized the procedure for the selection of Lokpal, the transparency clauses and the proposal to disallow the Lokpal from taking cognizance of public grievances.

Amid continuing protests, the Government constituted a committee to Draft a Jan Lokpal Bill. Kejriwal was one of the civil society

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