This Little USB Holds 19,000 Indian Standards
foreign land, it’s costs 1.4 lakh rupees, ten times as much. If you want to do business with India, you need to know what the safety laws of India are.
[Anuj Srinivas] Correct, right. Correct. In 2013, you took some of this data and made it public; but the BIS didn’t appreciate that.
[Carl Malamud] Well, BIS didn’t notice. What happened at first is I purchased a number of Indian standards. One of the things I do is I don’t sneak around. I don’t hide. I called Mr. Sam Pitroda, who was in government at the time, working for Manmohan Singh; and said, “Pitroda-ji, I’d like to come see you.” I went and saw him, and I brought copies of standards. I explained the situation and said, “I’m going to put these online. What do you think?” He goes, “Puh, this is good.” I said, “Well, you know the Bureau of Indian Standards might be annoyed.” He goes, “This is important information. It should be available.” They didn’t notice. I took all 19,000 standards. I put them online. I paid $5,000 a year for the DVD. Then, it came time to renew my subscription.
[Anuj Srinivas] Sure.
[Carl Malamud] I sent them a letter. I said, “Yes, here’s a purchase order. I would love to renew my subscription. By the way, here’s all the standards, and we’ve taken 971 of them, and we’ve transformed them into HTML. We’ve redrawn the diagrams as SVG graphics. We’ve recoded the formulas as MATHML. Would you like copies of all that information?” I got a letter back saying, basically, stop, you must stop immediately. They refused to renew my subscription. They demanded we take them down.
I sent them a letter back, and I explained why, in my belief, under the Indian system of government, under the Indian Constitution, under the Right to Information Act, this was public information. They disagreed. We petitioned the ministry, that’s the next step. Big fancy petition. Pitroda did an affidavit. Vinton Cerf, father of the Internet, did an affidavit. A number of very prominent professors of water engineering and transportation signed affidavits. We had examples of why the standards looked better, why we were adding values.
It went up to the ministry, and after a while we got an answer back. “No, you can’t do it.” The next step is a public interest litigation suit. Along with my colleague Srinivas Kodali, who is a very talented young transportation engineer and Dr. Sushant Sinha, who does the amazing Indian Kanoon. We filed suit. The law firm of Nishith Desai agreed to represent us pro bono. They’re not charging any money. Salman Khurshid, former Minister of Law, agreed to represent us
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