Code Swaraj
standards, and they’re going to want the complete edition of all prior versions. All I care about is the stuff that has legal import.
[Anuj Srinivas] Yeah. Do you see yourself as a stakeholder that’s trying to get the government to do its job better with regard to public access?
[Carl Malamud] That is exactly what I’m trying to do. I want to put myself out of business. I don’t want to be doing Indian standards. BIS knows that way better than me. I don’t have the source code, right. I’ve got to take a PDF file and retype it to turn it into HTML. Or if I’m lucky, it’s born digital; but even then, I have to reformat it, right. You pull it out of PDF, paragraph marks, italics, footnotes, superscripts. A tremendous amount of work. If I had their original Word files. I’m assuming that’s what it is, it’d be trivial. It’s their job. They should be doing it. They should have it available for bulk access, so anybody can download it. So Indian Kanoon, for example, could just, boom, incorporate it into their search engine. That’s a good thing, because all of a sudden the standards are all over. Everybody knows safety standards; we have a safer world.
[Anuj Srinivas] Sure. That’s true. Just to wrap up this discussion, this concept of a safer world. Generally, in your previous speeches and talks that I’ve heard, you’ve talked about the link between greater access to public information and genuinely perhaps understanding and solving current social, economic, political problems of today’s time. Why do you believe these two are connected?
[Carl Malamud] I believe we have a number of problems in our world that look intractable, that look unsolvable. Global warming. A lot of people just don’t believe it’s true, or they’re not taking action, or their self-interest is, “I’m not taking action, because I work in a coal mine; and I like pollution, because I make more money on it.” Intolerance towards other people. Poverty, right. Education is the way out of poverty. Famine, disease. The question is what can we do about these problems? I firmly believe that access to knowledge is the only way we’re going to move forward.
If all citizens begin to understand climate change, at some point they will demand we take action; because it truly is a global crisis. We must take action. The more people that understand—I don’t care which government it is, they are politicians. If everybody is standing up saying, “Global warming! Oh my God, we’ve got to do something. Look at these hurricanes, look at these fires, look at these droughts.” Then we’ll have change.
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