Not even a teenager, this girl is a rights activist

The similarities between Delhi-based RTI activist Subhash Chandra Agarwal and Aishwarya Parashar from Lucknow are many. Both are RTI activists and have used the Right to Information Act to expose deficiencies in the system. But there is a huge difference also. Agarwal is 62 years old while Aishwarya is barely 11 and a sixth standard
student.

In an age, when most of the children spend their time playing games and watching cartoons, Aishwarya concentrates on major issues affecting people and remains busy in drafting queries to be asked from the government on various topical issues. Her classmates, friends and the people in her area call her “the RTI girl”. People from different walks of life meet her with their problems and find out if their problems could be resolved through the RTI.

And if the answer is in the positive, they ask Aishwarya to prepare their queries as she is an expert.

The little girl had first used the RTI three years back when she was only eight, to get a garbage dump in front of her school shifted. “There was a garbage dump just in front of my school. We could not even sit in the class owing to its strong bad smell. I requested my school teachers to get it removed but they could not,” she said.

“I then asked the chief minister’s office through n RTI query as to who will be
responsible if someone falls sick because of the filth. Though I did not get any reply, the dump was removed and a library was constructed on that spot,’’ she told Deccan Herald.

For Aishwarya, it was a big moment. She had now understood how potent a weapon the RTI Act was and since then she has been using to extract many a hidden information, some of them really astonishing.

It was sheer curiosity, however, which made the girl famous all over the country. She once asked her parents how Mahatma Gandhi had become “Father of the Nation”. She did not get any reply from them. Her efforts to elicit an answer from teachers also did not yield any result. So she again turned to her favourite weapon-RTI. Aishwarya filed a RTI query to know the fact.

She sought a photocopy of the “order” of the Government of India by which the title of “Father of the Nation” had been conferred on Mahatma Gandhi. Aishwarya had filed an application under the RTI act with the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) in February last. Her query was forwarded to the Ministry of Home Affairs and from there to the national archives.

The query revealed that there were no “specific documents” to prove if Mahatma Gandhi had been conferred the title of the “Father of the Nation”. In his reply, Assistant Director of the National Archives Jayaprabha Ravindran said that it did not have any specific documents on the information  sought.

Another query by her revealed that the country had no national game. It was
another shock to the nation especially for the hockey lovers, who thought that it was the national game of India.  Recently, Aishwarya’s query revealed that there was no official order declaring the Independence Day, Republic Day and Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary as national festivals. “My parents are my biggest inspiration. They always encourage me to focus on issues concerning the country and the common people,’’ she says.

On whether the exercise affects her studies, she replies in the negative.  “Instead of playing or watching television, I do my homework and study,” Aishwarya, who is very fond of singing and dancing, said. During the examinations, of course, she gets less time for these activities.

The little girl keeps a tab on what is happening around her though she is least interested in politics.  “Corruption is the biggest challenge before the country today. Public awareness only can effectively combat it,’’ she points out. Recently, when she came to know that the UP government was finalising the names of the people to be appointed information commissioners in the state, she launched a campaign to make sure that there were no “corrupt” people in the list. Aishwarya asked the people to send e-mails to her or send letters to the Governor urging him not to give his nod to the appointment of the people on the post who were of doubtful integrity. The girl plans to launch a campaign against polythene bags in the days to come.

“I want to see my country free from polythene bags,” she says.Aishwarya feels that in the form of RTI the people of the country have got a very strong weapon. “We can use the RTI for the benefit of the people,’’ she says. There is a need to sensitise the official machinery to be forthcoming in giving timely replies to the queries filed under the RTI, she feels.