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 is 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.”

Students from Andhra Pradesh steal the show this year too, with 19 toppers


Students from Andhra Pradesh once again stole the thunder at the JEE this year. Nineteen of the first 50 All India Ranks went to students from that state, including the first three from the IIT-Madras Zone (which comprises all southern
states). Only around 40 students from Tamil Nadu could make it to the top 1,000, which is not unusual considering the results of the past couple of years.

In the last 60 years, it was just once — in 2001 — that Chennai produced a JEE topper, while Delhi and Mumbai have done it more than thrice. This year, the Madras zone has nearly 40 students in first 100 ranks and 27 more between 100 and 200.

But most of them are from Hyderabad and other places in Andhra Pradesh. Compared to over 193 students from Hyderabad who have made to the first 1,000, only 41 have made it from Tamil Nadu.

While some ascribe these results to the rigour of coaching classes in other States, others blame the disconnect between the State Board syllabus in Tamil Nadu and the JEE curriculum. Very few students from the State Board stream even attempt JEE here, say the numbers.

“The syllabus of Andhra Pradesh is very similar to JEE. In Tamil Nadu, though the State syllabus covers more topics than CBSE or JEE, the testing patters are entirely based on 'text book sums',” said Balajee Sampath, a trainer.

According to experts, nearly 200 students of the nearly 9,000 who took JEE from Tamil Nadu cleared the test. “This is not really bad. It is more about less number of students from the state attempting the exam, it is not about their
performance,” said Mr. Sampath, who emphasised that over 38, 000 students from Andhra Pradesh took the JEE this year in contrast.

“Also there is almost no awareness about IITs in cities such as Coimabtore and Madurai, whereas every district in Andhra Pradesh has a coaching centre,” he added.

While most coaching centres in the city conduct three-hour classes thrice or four times a week, those in other centres have a very different schedule. Shantanu Mohan, a student of IIT-Madras, from Hyderabad , who underwent ‘intensive coaching,' there said, “Classes for us used to start at five in the morning, every day for four five years. The emphasis is on solving as many sums of every kind that you and over time, you learn to solve sums even without thinking.”

The training is not that rigorous in Chennai, which is a good thing, he believes. A IIT-Madras professor added that students who spend six years of coaching in Kota or Andhra Pradesh come are so bogged down by the process that
they fail to perform here. “That way, the students from the city, though few in number, manage quite well,” he said.