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.
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.
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