RTI query reveals, Lotus is not India's national flower

Sanjay Pandey, Lucknow, DH News Service, Nov 7 2017, 23:28 IST

The query was submitted by a Lucknow-based RTI activist Aishwarya Parashar.

Contrary to popular perception Lotus is not the national flower of India. In fact, India does not have a national flower.

A response to a query under the Right to Information Act (RTI) by the Botanical Survey of India (BSI) has revealed that Lotus is not the national flower of the country.

The query was submitted by a Lucknow-based RTI activist Aishwarya Parashar.

Aishwarya, in her query to the BSI, which was under the Ministry of Environment and Forests, had sought to know if Lotus had been declared as the national flower of India.

In his response, Tapas Kumar Ghosh, a junior administrative officer and CPIO of the BSI, said that his organisation had not declared any flower as the national flower.

''The BSI has never declared any flower as the national flower of India," Ghosh said in his response.

Aishwarya, a class XI student at a school here, said that the response proved that the information on the Government of India website that Lotus was the national flower was ''incorrect''.

''Since my childhood, I have been told like others that Lotus is our national flower...I preferred the RTI query out of my curiosity to know the truth,'' she told DH.

She said that the government must either officially declare Lotus as the national flower or remove the incorrect information from its website to clear the confusion.

Aishwarya plans to write a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi requesting him to take steps to remove the confusion.