Three years ago, a group of parents in a remote tribal hamlet in India handed local officials a petition demanding a new school. Their children had to walk nearly 3 km through farmland, forest and creeks to reach the closest public school, although, they argued, the country's new Right to Education law entitled them to something closer.

But while the new law may have stirred the people of Dalki Sahi, Orissa, into action, they still don't have a new school. And across India, amid questions about whether the government can really deliver, many are asking whether the law was merely a well-intentioned promise dressed up as a legally enforceable fundamental right.

In the past eight years, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government has enacted a set of laws that give Indians the right to peer through official files and to get schools, rural jobs, forest land and, most recently, food at rock-bottom prices. Some call it India's silent rights-based revolution.