The Right to Information Act of 2005 entitles any Indian citizen to ask a public authority for information and to be answered within thirty days.
In Punjab it has been used to obtain land records, panchayat accounts, shamlat auction records, gurdwara committee documents where the body is public, contract details and appointment records, and it is the main tool available to anyone trying to establish what actually happened in a village dispute.
The Zameen Prapti Sangharsh Committee's common land campaign has used it extensively.
RTI activists in Punjab, as elsewhere in India, have been attacked and in some cases killed.
For a project like this one it is directly relevant: a great deal of what this site records as unknown is held by a government office and could be asked for by anyone with a stamp and a form.
The village's own hadbast number, its shamlat records, its school enrolment, its water quality tests and its panchayat accounts are all obtainable, and almost nobody asks.
The Right to Information Act covers every public authority in the state, which includes the panchayat, the mandi board, the pollution control board and the water resources department.
An application costs ten rupees. Most of the gaps this site records could be closed by somebody in Punjab filing one and publishing the reply.
The state information commission is slow and appeals take years, and the answer to a well drafted question still arrives more often than not.