PM's praise for 'Selfie with Daughter' helps: Bibipur Sarpanch

Chandigarh, Sept 27: With Prime Minister Narendra Modi terming the 'Selfie with Daughter' an "international movement" during his interaction with the Silicon Valley CEOs, the man behind the initiative, Bibipur village Sarpanch, today said his words of praise was helping the campaign.

"PM praising the initiative on various platforms is definitely helping the entire campaign and the motive it aims to achieve," Sunil Jaglan, the sarpanch, told PTI.

Jaglan had launched the 'Selfie with Daughter' campaign in Jind in June this year. "I had launched this initiative to give a boost to Prime Minister's pet initiative of Beti Bachao-Beti Padhao," he said.

Speaking before a gathering of Silicon Valley CEOs at San Jose today, Modi referred to the campaign as "an initiative by a father in Haryana to draw attention towards girl child" that "became an international movement..."

The Sarpanch desires to meet the Prime Minister and share his other initiatives with him. He said the Bibipur Panchayat had recently launched 'Digital India with Laado', a campaign to replace names of family-heads in the nameplates with their daughter's moniker.

"We started this campaign in our village and so far we have replaced 50-60 name plates," he said. Representatives of village panchayat visit households and put up nameplates bearing names and email id of the daughters of the house-head along with the tagline 'Digital India With Laado', he said.

"I want this campaign to be taken up nationwide. I am writing to Prime Minister and Haryana Chief Minister also in this regard," Jaglan, a post-graduate in Computer Science, said.

Jaglan said he has put a nameplate outside his house bearing his elder daughter's name 'Nandini (Niwas)'. He also recalled how everyone in his village thought a son had been born to him when he had celebrated and distributed sweets on birth of his first daughter.

Many were taken aback when they discovered that it was not a son, he said.

"On that day, I decided to do something to change this mindset of people towards the girl child," he stated.

PTI