Indo-Asian News Service
http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/10-year-old-s-rti-on-father-of-the-nation-title-for-gandhi-193508
Lucknow: It is not every day that a 10-year-old catches the office of
the Prime Minister of India off-guard and without answers. But then,
Aishwarya Parashar, a class six student, is no ordinary girl. She has
stumped the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) with her Right to
Information (RTI) query on when and by what orders was the title of
'Father of the Nation' conferred on Mahatma Gandhi.
Sitting in her small but neatly kept house in Rajajipuram F Block, the
backdrop of teddy bears and toys makes her just any other Barbie doll
loving girl next door.
But this is only till she starts to speak. Aishwarya, a student of the
City Montessori School, Rajajipuram branch, chuckles throughout the
conversation on how her mother has "groomed her into the RTI mode",
adding that she finds the act so helpful that she has filed two RTIs
against garbage dumps outside her school, in the past.
Asked what prompted her to file the RTI application on Gandhi and send
it to the PMO, Aishwarya told IANS how the term 'Father of the Nation'
had always "somehow excited and interested" her after she read it in
her social studies text book.
"I would keep asking my mom 'why is Gandhi referred to as the Father
of the Nation', to which my mother mostly had no answers till one fine
day she thought of the RTI route". Her mother Urvashi Sharma is happy
that the PMO has "at least taken cognizance of the letter", even if
the response has not been to their satisfaction.
Aishwarya, the eldest of three siblings, had written to the PMO on Feb
13, seeking a photocopy of the government order (GO) that conferred
the famous title of Father of Nation on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
The PMO replied that they had no such record whatsoever and directed
the query to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), which then referred
the case to the National Archives of India (NAI).
The NAI's Assistant Director and Central Public Information Officer
Jayprabha Ravindran also had no answers to the poser by the Lucknow
girl, and responded with an invite to Aishwarya asking her to visit
the Archives to find for herself if there were any such relevant
papers. Daughter of Sanjay Parashar, a lecturer at GB Pant Polytechnic
College, Aishwarya's mother is an RTI activist as well.
The NAI, she added, in a letter dated March 26, was an institution to
provide documents and was not in any way a research helping body. It
however offered all facilities to the girl in her "quest for the
Gandhi research."
History however holds that the title of Father of the Nation was given
to the Mahatma by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, who in his address on
Singapore Radio on July 6, 1944 has addressed Mahatma Gandhi as Father
of the Nation. Thereafter on April 28, 1947 Gandhi was referred with
the same title by Sarojini Naidu at a conference.
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Tags: 10-year-old files RTI, Father of the Nation, Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi
Read more at: http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/10-year-old-s-rti-on-father-of-the-nation-title-for-gandhi-193508&cp
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