Page:Code Swaraj - Carl Malamud - Sam Pitroda.djvu/15

 Additional Remarks Following Speech Before the Institution of Engineers (India)

Sam Pitroda, Ahmedabad, October 3, 2016

[concludes speech]

Thank you!

[applause]

I have a friend who has been working on Internet for the last 25 or 30 years. Carl was the one who built the first radio station on Internet.

[applause]

Carl also is an activist who takes government information and makes it public. Government does not want their information to become public, so Carl runs an independent nonprofit foundation.

In India, for example, just to give you an idea, there are 19,000 standards from Bureau of Indian Standards, for building, safety, children's toys, machines. These standards are published by Bureau of Indian Standards, but not available to public. You have to buy it.

We have been pushing all over the world to make standards public. We bought a set of standards in India, and Carl put it on the Internet, and government of India panicked, saying, "You can't do that, that's copyright." It's available. It is not your standard. Public has spent money, it is public standard, and public is supposed to know about it.

They don't agree. They say, "You can't do that. You have to pay." If you want to buy a building standard it is 16,000 rupees. If sitting outside of India you want to buy Indian Building Standards it is 160,000 rupees.

If I am a civil engineering student and I want to learn about building standards, I have to buy the standards from the government of India. We are saying, "No, it's public information." Carl has sued Indian government now, and there's a court case going on. We are saying, "This is everywhere, this is true