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Are citizens helpless?

Are citizens really helpless? Can electronic networks help to take up people’s interests and fight problems like corruption?

Sameer Sachdeva (sachdeva_sameer@hotmail.com), the moderator of the India-Egov network argued recently that even honest “bureaucrats are actually powerless people in the game for power.” The power centre lies somewhere else, Sachdeva argued, and contended that what citizens need to do is shift the power centre towards themselves.

He suggested tools like online discussion fora of like-minded people and specialists in certain areas. The inputs from these discussions can be then posted/archived on a central website of a ‘shadow’ government.

He suggested building of networks among citizen-friendly organisations.

Some sites and initiatives he pointed to while making this point were:

www.ccsindia.org

www.loksatta.org

www.pacindia.org

www.humanrightsinitiative.org

www.parivartan.com

www.righttoinfo.info

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/skdubeyFoundation/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indiathinkersnet/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ncfi/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mahadhikar

http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/india-egov

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PUCL/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bombaynet/

http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/india-egov

Sameer Sachdeva can be contacted on his mobile at +91-9896126630

Government work

Umashankar, another active member on the India-egov network, recently won an award for his paper ‘Disasters and data protection—the way shown by Tiruvarur’. Other papers which won awards were

* Improving governance through performance management by Dr P K Mohanty.

* Regulator to facilitator—DGFT: eenewal through EDI, re-engineering & strategic standardisation by Ajay Srivastava.

* Web-based tender notice information system by Prakash Kumar. Some government and other websites that have won accolades for their work in India are: www.maharashtra.gov.in incometaxindia.gov.in

delhigovt.nic.in

www.teaserve.com

www.gujaratindia.com

haryana.nic.in

www.rajasthan.gov.in

www.bsnl.co.in

www.statebankofindia.com

www.defstand.gov.in

www.punjabtourism.org

www.coimbatore-corparation.com

www.maha-ss.com

Sachdeva also points out that bilingual websites were one of the points in implementation of a minimum agenda for e-governance. But the Hindi website of the department which monitors the minimum agenda is itself in a test phase (check www.darpg.nic.in/hindi.asp ).

Parliament site

Recently, if you visited the website at http://www.parliamentofindia.nic.in to access parliamentary questions through that site, you would have had a difficult time.

For one, I found I could not locate the Rajya Sabha answers on the site, but could only access the questions raised. In the absence of the answers, the questions alone are of limited use.

Secondly, the format for storing the questions is PDF. These are not only difficult to download, especially as many of us in India still use slow-speed dial-up modems, but also cumbersome to work with. Search becomes difficult and slow. Questions-and-answers could be maintained in plain text format.

The limited search options allow one to find only those questions pertaining to 1998 or 2000 and earlier. Unless this information is kept up to date, it would not be of much use to the average citizen.

Needless to say, the functioning of Parliament and the information it throws forth—especially those pertaining to developmental issues—is of direct relevance both to the average citizen and to journalists too.

Sanskrit e-tutor

The Asian Studies WWW Monitor, put out by Dr T Matthew Ciolek <tmciolek@coombs.anu.edu.au> of the Australian National University, Canberra, has highlighted this initiative from New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.

It’s a tutor for the Sanskrit language that a student and Dr Sudhir Kaicker <sudhir_kaicker@hotmail.com> have created.

The version that is presented at this time is intended for PCs with Windows; but since the package has been created in Java—a platform-neutral programming language—a little modification will enable it to be run on any type of computer that can be used to surf the Web.

Say the software’s writers: “The package is not quite complete, yet. At this time we are offering four chapters and a section on diacritics (pronunciation symbols); but more will shortly be added. (Even this means 1.5 million lines of code, however!) Please visit the website, download the tutor, and give us your opinion.” http://www.sanskrit-lamp.org

Volunteering abroad

Starting 2004 Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO), a UK-based charity will start recruiting VSO volunteers from India to work in other ‘developing’ countries in Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. VSO (www.vso.org.uk) will recruit volunteers through a program called iVolunteer Overseas (www.ivoindia.org), which is a joint initiative with MITRA, a non-profit charity based in India. A typical VSO volunteering assignment lasts for two years and volunteers are provided with travel assistance, grants, training support and a modest monthly allowance during the period of their placements. Skills being looked for are IT teaching and training. VSO volunteers working in Information and Communications Technology strengthen the ability of schools, non-governmental organisations and VSO programme offices to conduct their work. The role of an ICT volunteer can vary greatly from placement to placement. Typically, placements involve teaching or training colleagues in a secondary or vocational school setting, or could involve IT specialist roles such as network maintainance, programmers, website and database design. A volunteer may be asked to review and introduce new software and hardware.

Volunteer profile: Volunteers should have a formal qualification in IT and ideally a teaching qualification and experience or a strong background in IT training with at least two years’ experience of general troubleshooting or systems analysis. For more information on how to apply to become a VSO volunteer visit www.ivoindia.org or contact Rahul at 011-26217460 or send a mail to ivo@mitra.org.in

Soybean story

Amy Waldman recently focused on how farmers in India—in one case, from a tiny village of 2,500—are using the Net to check the prices on the Chicago Board of Trade. This story made it to the New York Times. Check http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/01/international/asia/01INDI.html (free registration required)

Coimbatore, e-gov

Another interesting story from the Net: Coimbatore, popularly known as the Manchester of South India, with an approximate population of 1.1 million and a floating population of around 1.5 lakh, has adopted an ‘Anything Anywhere’ project for better transparency in administration. Before e-governance, collection of corporation dues like property tax, water charges, etc., or citizens applying for any specific service in the corporation, be it capital and maintenance works executed by the corporation or the issue of various certificates like birth and death certificates and trade license certificates, was done manually and took a lot of time to process.

From the neighbourhood

The S-Asia-IT mailing list reports that a four-day conference entitled ‘ICT for Development in Pakistan’ http://www.ict4d.org.pk/ was held in Islamabad in December to “identify the potential, which ICTs (Information & Communication Technologies) especially remote sensing and GIS, can provide for better management and utilisation of resources available for development”. A number of presentations and speeches were made during the conference. See http://www.ict4d.org.pk/presentations/presentation.htm

E-gov, in Hindi

Shashi Shukla <shashishukla@yahoo.com> writes to say that he has written a book in Hindi on e-governance. Shukla is from the All India Society for Electronics & Computer Technology (AISECT) at Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh. He can be contacted on phone at 0755-3130443.

From Netcore

Netcore’s newsletter <newsletter@netcore.co.in>, now in Volume 1 Number 6, is an interesting source for news and updates. The December 2003 issue contains information about the firm—which kept busy as sponsors at IIT-Bombay, demonstrating their product ‘Pragatee’, showing a complete GNU/Linux-based office set-up, with demo desktops running the Emergic desktop and thin-clients running Emergic Freedom, and servers running ‘Pragatee’ and ‘Traction’ for enterprise knowledge management. It also has a detailed introduction to BlogStreet.com—a portal for weblogs.

Comments Prakash Advani: “What is a weblog? A frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links. It is, literally, a ‘log’ of the web—a diary-style site, in which the author (a weblogger, or blogger) links to other Web pages he or she finds interesting.”

Bangla news

This info is from Indic-computing-users mailing list http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net/Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu@clai.net> tells us that the Ankur Bangla Live CD version 1.0 (PaantoBhuter Jyaanto Chhaanaa) is the culmination of more than one year of tireless effort by Ankur team’s Bangla Project volunteers. They call it ‘a release to be truly proud of’.

The Live CD is designed to be just a preview of what Ankur has in store for Bangla-speaking people from all over the world. “We promise much, much more very soon. Already, our hackers have started work on KDE—and you’ll be seeing a Bangla localised version of Evolution within a few weeks,” says the ever-enthusiastic Dasgupta.

This release is basically a highly tweaked version of the previous version (beta3). Updated packages include xine-lib (now at 1.0-rc1) and Gaim 0.72 (with support for the newer avatars of MSN and Yahoo! protocols). The documentation has been updated, and with this release, as soon as you pop your CD into your Windows box, it autoruns with a nice HTML page coming up with info about the CD and directions on how to boot from it.

They’ve also included TightVNC in this release of the Live CD. That means that you can do some really cool stuff with it. (Bangla Desktop in a browser, anyone?) Ankur is not only restricted to GNU/Linux. Quite a few of its projects have ports for Windows. This CD contains some of the Windows software from Ankur. For example, Lekho is a plain text editor designed to take in phonetic input from a standard US keyboard and convert (transliterate) it online into Bangla text. Also included is the Probhat for Windows package, which lets you use the Probhat Bangla layout (from Ankur) in Windows XP/2000. Moreover, they have also included a wonderful piece of software which is not from Ankur, but is heavily used by the Ankur developers. It is called Yudit, and if you are not using it—install it today! Yudit works in both Windows and GNU/Linux.

ISO image and its MD5sum can be downloaded (approx 408 MB download) from http://sourceforge.net/project/ showfiles.php?group_id=43331&package_id=96 784&release_id=205011 Mailing list for people interested in the LiveCD is at http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bengalinux-distro Screenshots at http://www.bengalinux.org/screenshots/gnome/

FLOSS report

Paul J Dravis <paul@dravis.net> reports that a report on FLOSS (free/libre and open source software) titled ‘Open Source Software: Perspectives for Development’ was released at the infoDev Symposium, held in conjunction with the World Summit on an Information

Society in Geneva recently. This effort was commissioned by infoDev/World Bank.

The report intends to assist decision makers, globally, in better understanding Free/Libre and Open Source software when assessing this technology option. Presented are initiatives by governments around the world, a selection of private sector uses of FLOSS, support by commercial technology providers, a set of case studies in ‘developing’ countries, along with a brief status of the legal landscape. See the report and why it is relevant to India at http://www.infodev.org/symp2003/publications/OpenSourceSoftware.pdf

India Computes! is presented by Frederick Noronha, a freelance journalist based in Goa. He is the co-founder of BytesForAll, a voluntary unfunded venture focusing on how IT and the

Internet can benefit the common man, particularly in South Asia. To join the Bytesforall mailing list send a blank e-mail to bytesforall_readers-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Website: www.bytesforall.org