Code Swaraj
7. A Video Record of India. Seventh, closely related to the audio archives, are the video archives. We posted the 53 episodes of Bharat Ek Khoj, and it is as popular and relevant now as it was when it first aired. Why not post the Ramayana? Or the thousands of other amazing productions celebrating song, dance, art, and the culture and history of India? Doordarshan, like All India Radio, was a part of the government for a long time. Now, it is an independent agency, but one with a public mission.
In addition to Doordarshan, there are other archives of video throughout India that could easily be made more broadly available. My experience with the U.S. National Archives is that those working to preserve videos are eager to see their work more broadly used. When our volunteers copied 6,000 videos and made them available for over 75 million views, the archivists were thrilled. Too often videos are kept hidden in a mistaken attempt at monetizing the archives, but doing so rarely results in broad distribution or even in any significant sums of money, and purposefully holding our history back does not do proper service to the public.
There is one more aspect of making video, photographs, and audio available in the best quality possible. One of the hardest part of making a film or a news production, or a high-quality magazine article, is finding what is known as “B-Roll” for film or “stock photos” for print. If you're writing a travel piece, you might want a photo of the Taj Mahal. If you're making a movie about India, you might want footage of Nehru. Obtaining these kinds of historical materials is often very difficult.
By digitizing the public core of the historical record and making that information available for free and unrestricted use, the government would be making a nice gift to Bollywood and the news media and to all the small independent filmmakers, writers, and even students that wish to use the materials in their own work. By creating this common public core, one encourages private activity.
Those seven areas are difficult, yet fairly straightforward. I wish to pose three more challenges:
- 8. traditional knowledge;
- 9. modern scientific knowledge;
- 10. the broad aspirational goal of democratizing information.
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