Note on Code Swaraj
There are ten areas that I think we can work in. Many of those areas are already underway. I wish to be clear that others may have different, perhaps better, lists. I do not pose these 10 items as any sort of definitive program. I firmly believe when Gandhi-ji said to “be the change,” he meant not only that people should act, but also that people should look inwards and should not be telling others what to do.
1. Technical Knowledge. First, of course, is the fight for access to technical knowledge, the standards satyagraha. In this area, the question has been posed, not only in India, but throughout the world. Millions of people have used the standards we have posted, we have informed the citizenry in the U.S. and India, and it is clear there is a great need for this information to be more widely developed.
We await the judgement of the Honorable High Court of Delhi and the Honorable U.S. Court of Appeals, but we must do more than simply wait. We must raise the issue in the minds of people who must use these documents, educators and engineers and city officials and ordinary citizens. Only if we all raise our voices and demand that the technical rules that govern our society be made available will this become real.
2. Public Library of India. Second, access to books is also well underway with the Public Library of India. Much work remains to be done, and there is so much potential in doing high-quality scans of all the libraries in India. For the current collection, much needs to be done to unleash the potential, fixing metadata, finding broken scans, and adding more materials. There is also a crying need to apply advanced optical character recognition to the texts.
Much as I admire the government efforts that resulted in the Digital Library of India, I believe that the entire corpus should be rescanned. In particular, the scanning is at low resolution and there are many missing and skewed pages. This makes the collection incomplete, and it is difficult to do optical character recognition. A large public scanning center located in India that made public domain materials available would be quite useful for making a large volume of educational materials available in all the languages of India. Our current collection is 400,000 books, but my estimates are that a more complete effort would entail scanning several million books. This is a very doable goal and would only take a few years. It would be a wonderful investment in the future of education in India.
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