http://www.thesundayindian.com/singleview.asp?sid=8809
Special Feature
A little big girl
A Lucknow schoolgirl invokes RTI to rid the street outside her school
of a garbage dump, reports Puja Awasthi
Aishwarya Sharma, who turned nine this month, created history of sorts
by becoming the youngest person to file a Right to Information (RTI)
application and see it through to get results. Sharma's application,
filed on November 30, 2009, wanted to know why an overflowing garbage
disposal site, where pigs and dogs roamed freely, should exist right
across her school and be a possible source of infection to her and the
other children.
Sharma's mother Urvashi has been an RTI activist for long and has
recently set up an RTI helpline, yet it was only recently that
Aishwarya began to pay attention to what her mother was doing. "The
swine flu scare was all over. But no one, not even parents, was
willing to pay any attention to that possible source of infection that
stood right across our school," says the girl who has just been
promoted to Class Four.
Coached well by her mother, Aishwarya prattles that the RTI is what
"allows you to rectify anything that is wrong. It is a tool to weed
out corruption," faltering when asked what precisely does Section 6 of
the Act that she so often quotes say.
The RTI route was not the first that Aishwarya took. She initially
wrote to chief minister Mayawati's office in October 2009 asking for
the garbage dump to be removed. When no answers came, she took the RTI
way, dipping into her own piggy bank to pay the Rs 10 that is to be
attached to every RTI query. In her baby handwriting, guided by her
mother, she had three pointed queries for the chief minister's Public
Information Officer: one, was there any rule which permitted the
building of a garbage disposal site near a school; two, if the garbage
were to become a source of infection for the children in her school,
who would be held responsible; and lastly that she be given a
photocopy of the file into which the first letter she had sent to the
CM had gone.
In February this year, she received a response from the city's civic
authorities (Lucknow Nagar Nigam), informing her that the city's
Health Officer and the Mayor had directed that the site should no
longer be used for disposal of garbage and that a fresh site be built
elsewhere. "But they did not answer any of my questions," she points
out. In less than a month, the girl was at it again: writing a fresh
application to the Appeals Officer at the Nagar Nigam asking why her
queries had not been responded to precisely and why had she not
received copies of the orders of the two authorities mentioned in the
reply.
"But I went there yesterday. There is no garbage. Instead there is a
public library with books, newspapers and magazines," she says, voice
soaked in excitement. Ever since Aishwarya's story became public, the
stream of photographers and media persons to her home and school in
the city's suburban Rajajipuram area have not stopped.
"My friends would not believe me at first. Even now there is this boy
who says I get my relatives to take my pictures and the press cuttings
I show around are actually my father's doing on a computer. Some
friends now ask me to suggest topics on which they too can file RTIs,"
she laughs. But some children in her immediate circle have seen how
potent a tool RTI can be and that if somebody like Aishwarya could use
it and become famous for it, why cannot they do it too?
One among them is Priyanshi Yadav, a 13-year-old whose family is
friends with the Sharmas. Priyanshi, who is still mulling whether she
would like to be a model, an engineer or delve into multimedia as a
grown-up, has dashed off a letter to the city's Municipal Commissioner
asking for the 20 by 120 feet lane in front of her home to be turned
into a concrete road as soon as possible. "I got courage from
Aishwarya's feat but have experienced myself the difficulties of
walking on the uneven surface. So many children have skinned their
knees or fallen off their bicycles in this lane. If we have a RCC
road, even my home will look pretty", she says.
Priyanshi's letter, written on a page torn out of an exercise book, is
dated April 5 and does not forget to mention that a BSP legislator
lives along the lane as well.
Also counted among UP's growing list of children who are wielding the
RTI tool is Tanya Thakur (15) daughter of Amitabh Thakur an IPS
officer who first used the RTI in 2007 to get his Annual Confidential
Reports that were being denied to him and Nutan Thakur who is an RTI
activist and the editor of a newsletter. Tanya's application though is
a little different and flows out of a national forum that was convened
at a recent RTI seminar in Lucknow. "The forum", explains Nutan,
"allows people anonymity while asking for information as it offers an
individual the option of not seeking potentially sensitive information
in his own name. That information might be asked for by a forum member
living in a different state. This is especially useful for villages
where asking questions invariably leads to physical confrontations."
Thus Tanya's application has been made to the Maharashtra telecom
office asking for information on the payments that ahve been released
to various civil contractors against dead agreements by an executive
engineer in Solapur. Her 12-year-old brother, Aditya, penned a poem,
for the RTI seminar, that had the following to say of the government:
"the solid machine has turned to glass, now that we have the power."
As for Aishwarya, there is already another RTI idea that is swimming
in her head. "I want to know why the sale of cut fruits and fruit
juices in the open does not end. It is a potential health hazard," she
says. Why an obsession with health-related queries you might wonder.
Well that is explained by the fact that Aishwarya's ambition is to
become a doctor when she grows up.
The Sunday Indian ( India's Greatest News Magazine)
--
Urvashi Sharma
Social Worker
contact - 9369613513
@i$#w@ry@!
rti helpline-8081898081
rti helpmail aishwaryaj2010@gmail.com
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