India is my country and all Indians
are my brothers and sisters.
I love my country and I am proud of
it's rich and varied heritage.
I shall always strive to be worthy of
it.
I shall give respect to my parents,
teachers and all elders and treat everyone with courtesy.
To my country and my people, I pledge
my devotion.
In their well being and prosperity
alone, lies my happiness.
Do you know the author of this National Pledge?
Unfortunately, a majority of the students who recite this as a
ritual every morning and their teachers do not have the answer.
The National Pledge was penned by Pydimarri Venkata Subba
Rao, a noted author in Telugu and a bureaucrat, while working as the District
Treasury Officer of Visakhapatnam in 1962.Just like the National Anthem
and the National Song that’s engraved on our memory, our National Pledge is
taken by students in schools across the country, but the writer who penned it
is hardly known to people.
The author was a multi-faceted personality and a polyglot having achieved mastery in Sanskrit, Telugu, English and Arabic. He wrote on various subjects, including naturopathy besides authoring many books in Telugu, including a popular novel, 'Kalabhairavudu'.
A native of Anneparthi village near Nalgonda district, he
presented it to senior Congress leader Tenneti Viswanadam, who forwarded it to
the then Education Minister P.V.G. Raju, father of current Union Minister for
Civil Aviation Ashok Gajapathi Raju. Due to the efforts of the then Education
Minister, the Pledge was included in school textbooks which was later
translated to English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarathi and many other regional
languages.
The pledge was first introduced in a school in Visakhapatnam in
1963 and later in many other schools that year. It was recited in Republic Day
celebrations in 1965.Subba Rao was said to have been unaware of its status as
the National Pledge. He was said to have come to know about it when his
granddaughter was reading the pledge from her textbook.
The authors of National Anthem or the National Song are well known in India, but Subba Rao remains largely a little known figure, as his name is not mentioned either in books or in any document. The Human Resources Development Ministry, however, records Subba Rao as the author of the pledge. “Union Ministry of Human Resource Development records, however, show Subba Rao as the author of the Pledge.
Subba Rao was an employee in the
State Treasury Department and worked in various capacities in Nizamabad,
Khammam, Nellore, Visakhapatnam and Nalgonda and retired in 1971. While he was
in Visakhapatnam between 1962-64, India was in war with China during which time
Subba Rao wrote a story to inculcate patriotism among people.
Since the introduction of the Pledge
in school textbooks in the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh in 1964, it continues to
serve the same purpose as our National Anthem and is quite well-known. But its
author Pydimarri Venkata Subba Rao, who hails from Nalgonda district, has
remained inconspicuous for some reason and has not got the due recognition that
he so deserves.
The successive governments in united Andhra Pradesh made no efforts to popularize him, neither did they give him credit for his work by mentioning his name in the textbooks that had the Pledge.
Collected from News Paper.
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