Code Swaraj
I put 6,000 government videos, that the government has, online. We copied them, put them on YouTube, 50 million views. The stuff was just sitting there.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, it cost $30 to get the report of a public corporation, to get their IPO report, for example. We put it on for free, well, hundreds of millions of people access that information.
About five years ago, I started working on Indian data. I continue to work in the U.S., but U.S. and India are the two places I do my work now, and I maintain five collections.
First, photographs: the Ministry of Information has this huge collection of photographs that are online, but they’re hidden. You can’t find them. You pull up an index page, and there’s a thousand photos on there. You have to click through to get the actual photo. So I harvested those, took 12,000 photos, slapped them up on Flickr. These are amazing things. This is, pictures of Nehru from ’47 and ’48 and 49, pictures of the Republic Day celebrations over the years, a thousand photos of people playing cricket, Olympics, animals, the temples of India—just beautiful stuff. There should be much more of this, and it should be higher resolution.
Second, the Bureau of Indian Standards: the building code of India, 14,000 rupees. Every engineering student in India, 650,000 every year, need to consult this document, and they had to go down to the library, and consult the one CD-ROM. Or go to the library, and get that one book. We put that online, and we get millions and millions of views every month, on those.
And, in fact, we have not been sued by the Indian government. We’ve been sued in the United States and in Europe, by various standards organizations, but the Bureau of Indian Standards refused to sell us more. And the reason is, because I sent them a letter. I paid $5,000 a year to get the standards, and I ran it for a couple years, and they sent me a renewal notice. I said, “Sure, I’d love to renew. And by the way, here is all the standards, aren’t they great, can I give you the HTML?”
Because a lot of these standards, we sent in to India, retyped them into HTML, redrew the diagrams into SVG, coded the formulas into MathML. So you can see it on your cellphone, you can take a diagram, you can make it bigger, you can paste it into your document.
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