10-year-old's RTI posers stump PMO, Government
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article3453390.ece
News » National
NEW DELHI, May 25, 2012
10-year-old's RTI posers stump PMO, Government
Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar
Girl questions father of nation status for Gandhi
When some simple questions came to the mind of Aishwarya Parashar, a
Class-VI student of the City Montessori School, Lucknow, she did not
let them languish unasked. She went seeking out answers through the
Right to Information (RTI) Act. Aishwarya's inquisitiveness and
willingness to pursue the source of information has yielded, till
date, the establishment of a public library on the site of a garbage
dump and the nation being better enlightened about the Father of the
Nation, Mahatma Gandhi.
All of just 10 years, Aishwarya is a confident little girl, who
herself answers a mobile phone and urges those wanting some written
information from her to send her an SMS giving their e-mail ID and
even forwards e-mail and communicates about her work on her own.
"I have so far filed three RTIs with the Prime Minister's Office,''
she says, adding that "the first one was [a query] about who gave the
order for printing Mahatma Gandhi's image on currency notes. I was
told in a reply that it was in 1993 following a meeting of the Reserve
Bank of India."
But it was her subsequent RTI asking the PMO to tell her who conferred
the title of Father of the Nation on Mahatma Gandhi, which confounded
the government. From the PMO, the query went to the Ministry of Home
Affairs and to the National Archives of India, before Aishwarya was
told that "there are no specific documents on the information sought"
by her.
'Surprising'
"That was really surprising because I never thought it was such a
difficult question since even our history books taught us that Mahatma
Gandhi was the Father of the Nation."
The first reference to Mahatma Gandhi as Father of the Nation goes
back nearly 70 years when Subhas Chandra Bose referred to Gandhi thus
in a radio address from Singapore in 1944.
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru too had, in his address to the nation
upon Mahatma Gandhi's death, referred to him as Father of the Nation:
"Friends and comrades, the light has gone out of our lives, and there
is darkness everywhere, and I do not quite know what to tell you or
how to say it. Our beloved leader, Bapu as we called him, the Father
of the Nation, is no more."
After getting an unsatisfactory answer to her query on this issue in
March this year, Aishwarya on April 24 asked the PMO who had declared
Mahatma Gandhi's birth anniversary on October 2 as also Republic Day
and Independent Day national holidays. To her surprise, she got a
reply dated May 17 that such orders were never issued.
Favourite query
The question most dear to Aishwarya's heart was posed by her in 2009.
"That was the time when Lucknow was in the grip of swine flu. There
was a big garbage dump near my school, but I only got to see it one
day when my mother came to pick me up as my cycle-rickshaw had not
come. For the parents there was a separate entrance, and on the way
back home I spotted this dump."
With the help of her mother, Urvashi Sharma, who is a social worker
and RTI activist, Aishwarya penned an application in her own
handwriting. "I had marked that query on the garbage dump to the Chief
Minister and thereafter the Uttar Pradesh government got the dump
removed, and our school constructed a public library on the site."
Her father, Sanjay Sharma, is a lecturer.
Ambition
Aishwarya wants to become a doctor. Asked why, she quips: "Whenever I
go to a hospital, I see that the poor patients have to first shell out
money in order to get treated. I will, on becoming a doctor, go to the
slums at least once every week and provide free treatment to such poor
people."
Keywords: Aishwarya Parashar, RTI queries, Father of the Nation
status, Mahatma Gandhi, PMO
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article3453390.ece
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