Remarks of Carl Malamud
Now, we’re suing the government of India, in public interest litigation. Srinivas Kodali is one of my co-petitioners. My friend, Sushant Sinha, who is also here, who runs the amazing Indian Kanoon, a service of all the court cases, is my co-petitioner. Nishith Desai and Associates is representing us for free, in the High Court of Delhi, and Salman Khurshid is our senior attorney on the case.
We are before the judge again, in November. It’s all papered over, the Union Government has failed to respond, for the fourth time. We are hoping to get an oral argument, and win this case, because in India, the right to government information is constitutionally-based, and these standards are government documents that have the force of law.
Third is the collection, Srinivas talked about it, the Official Gazettes. We’re just starting on this one. We’ve got the Gazettes of India up. I’ve got Gazettes now for Karnataka, Goa, Delhi, and a couple more, kind of ready to start uploading, and we’re looking around, trying to figure out how to get the rest of them.
Collection number four is Hind Swaraj. I went to see Sam one day, and he goes, “You got a stick?”
“What?” So, I pulled out a USB drive, and he sticks it in his computer, and he hands it back to me about 15 minutes later, and I said, “What is this?”
He responded, “the Collected works of Mahatma Gandhi, all 100 volumes, 50,000 pages.” I said, “Well, where did you get this?”
“Oh, the Ashram gave it to me.”
“Well, what are they going to do with it?”
“They’re going to put it on a website,” Sam replied.
And so, I looked at it again, and asked, “well, can I put it on a website?”
“Go for it!” Sam said confidently.
“Won’t they be annoyed?”
“No. Nobody’s going to care.”
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