He turned a social activist after bitter experience with police

Satish Shetty started getting involved in public issues after a bitter experience with the police 20 years ago. "Our whole family was harassed; Satish, me and our father were beaten up by the police after a waiter working for an eatery that my father used to run died of natural causes in 1990. Satish had made extensive use of the RTI Act. Whenever he was denied information, he used RTI as a weapon," Shetty's brother Sandeep said.

Once he became an RTI activist, Shetty started using that as a tool to expose big scams, mostly related to land, PDS and illegal structures. Sandeep said Shetty also used to advise people to use RTI to get justice. Many aggrieved people used to come to him for guidance. But it was not easy as information, even using RTI, was not easy to come by; many a time it also required filing of multiple applications.  

"In 2006, using the RTI Act, he exposed Krushna Karke, former city president of the Talegaon Municipal Council (TMC), who had built a bungalow on railway land in 2003. This led to the structure being demolished in 2007. This also led to a hue and cry in the political circles. He did not stop at that; during the same year, he took on an influential builder who had illegally built a residential and commercial complex near Talegaon railway station. He used RTI to get information on land and building permissions," said advocate Sushilkumar Pise who was associated with Shetty for the past five years.

"In 2008, he got information under RTI and advised aggrieved parties to register cases against Nitin Sable, member of Pune Zilla Parishad who had illegally acquired 11 acres of land at Aade village in Maval Taluka; the case is being heard in the sessions court," Sandeep said.

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