This Little USB Holds 19,000 Indian Standards
bunch of people. Only after doing that, did I decide that, “Okay, it is my belief that this is public information.” You know what, if I was wrong, I will suffer the consequences. That’s the other part of doing this kind of work. If you do make a mistake, you might have to pay a penalty; and you need to be prepared for that.
[Anuj Srinivas] That’s true. That’s true. One thing—I’d like to just shift tacks a little bit here and talk about the government. Not only the Indian government, generally across the world, the government response to the kind of work that you do. Currently, in India, this government, the Modi government, the previous government; they both publicly maintained that we want to use technology for greater transparency, we want to use technology for greater public information access. You know, eGoveranance and so on and so forth. Sometimes the very first reaction they have to when someone comes out and does some work like this, is one of hostility.
We’ve seen a lot of people like yourself in India receive legal notices. You, yourself, are fighting a legal battle, as you’ve pointed out. Is there a contradiction between the way the governments claim what they’re standing for and their actual actions when it comes to this? And how do you view your role in this?
[Carl Malamud] Bureaucracies really will fight back on this kind of a thing. I went and saw Sam Pitroda, and he said, “Go for it.” But the Bureau of Indian Standards was like, “No, no, no. We’ve always done it this way. Everybody else does it this way.” If you were to go to them as a transparency advocate, or as a government minister-particularly as a government minister-you’re going to get an eight-hour long meeting with 15 BIS executives explaining why the sky will fall. When you’re in governance, you have to be careful. You don’t want to break things. Even if you’re trying to push for openness-the Obama administration was very good at that-but you can only go so far.
Working with civic society is important, and again, you do face hostility sometimes. A lot of my job is attempting to explain why it is we’re doing what we’re doing. Why this is the right thing to do. One of the prime techniques I have, is that I get millions of people using the information. Then, all of a sudden it’s not just some open government guy saying, “Hey, hey, hey, you should be doing it better.” It’s like look, “Millions of engineering students in India use this information every day. This is why you should have it. And look, the sky hasn’t fallen, right. You’re still selling standards.” You know what, even if I give away all the standards, there are people that are going to want certified copies of the
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