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Bytes For All
From Andhra Pradesh
Check this link— www.i4donline.net/issue/july03/digitalage.htm—for
an article by West Godavari collector and district magistrate Sanjay Jaju on
innovation in using IT in governance in parts of Andhra Pradesh. E-Seva in West
Godavari district is seen as addressing several issues that are of concern in
IT interventions through its multi-sectoral inclusion of self-help groups, women,
and innovative services as part of the e-governance solution.
IT to fight corruption?
Someone on the e-gov-india mailing list
suggested that using IT to fight corruption wouldn’t work for some time—this
because of political rather than technical reasons, and fear of resistance.
Atul Asthana <atulasthana@gmx.net> described corruption as the "process
of misusing one’s position to create an undue advantage for self." Says
Asthana, "I guess the moment e-gov tries to champion the cause of removing
corruption, the ‘e’ and the governance will be separated and massacred. Therefore
in the initial stages, let e-gov efforts improve efficiency, and once that is
entrenched, the effort should be to remove corruption." To join this list,
send a blank e-mail to india-egov-subscribe@yahoo groups.com Also check the
website of the International Conference on E-Governance (to be held at IIT-Delhi
in December 2003) which has a good resource listing for e-governance in India
and other countries. The listing is located at www.iitd.ac.in/iceg/links.html
(Fre)e-governance
Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>, the
founder of the Free Software Foundation—better known as RMS—recently made this
proposal to senior Indian officials regarding e-governance. He suggested that
a team here develop and place e-gov packages on the Web for the Indian central
and state governments and government organisations to download and use. They
will be able to modify the code and improve it as well. Says he: "I have
the full system design for automating a taluka office, DRDA, police station,
pension scheme office and block development office. These packages can be converted
into Open Source from the present Visual Basic and can be a useful resource
for the entire country."
Stallman’s point is that one can find volunteers
in India to develop the software one wants. However, programmers working as
volunteers tend to want to choose their own jobs and designs. This means that
if you want a specific program written, you may need to hire the people to do
it.
Adds Stallman: "There are many talented
programmers in our community who would like to have the chance to get paid to
develop free software, and some of them would turn aside better-paying jobs
that involve non-free software in order to get a job like this. So if India
decides to fund a project for this, it can probably get very good minds to work
on it. The FSF of India can help find them as long as the project is specified
and described as ‘free software’ rather than ‘open source.’ (We don’t like being
thought of by the slogan of the movement that was founded to co-opt our work.)"
Officials in India have already noticed
GovernmentForge.org, a site that claims to be "dedicated to providing free
and open source software to state and local governments." This site owes
its inspiration to School Forge. Says GovernmentForge: "Our primary objective
involves providing a place for you to find and download software for use in
your organisation. By facilitating the use of standards-based products we hope
to eliminate duplication of effort and costly licensing fees while encouraging
innovation at the state and local level."
Medical informatics
For details of a national conference on
medical informatics to be held at Chandigarh in October, see www.iamindia.org/confer.cfm
This bi-annual conference of the Indian Association for Medical Informatics
will be held on October 18-19, 2003 at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical
Education & Research at Chandigarh. The conference will focus on computer
applications in health, nursing, hospital administration and all specialities
of medicine.
Citizens’ charters in TN
For a link to citizens’ charters in Tamil
Nadu, see www.tn.gov.in/citizen/citizen.
htm For the all-India level, see www.goicharters.nic.in Recently, a CD on the
charters and a booklet were also released.
On telly too
India took up a series of programmes called
‘IT in the Service of the Citizen’, which was telecast across the country on
a schedule announced at darpg.nic.in Its focus included projects like e-Seva,
CARD, telecom (Hello Bharat), Mahiti Shakti, Bhoomi, the postal service’s Ek
Safar, STAR, Gyandoot, Setu, EPIC and Friends.
Kannada computing
With respect to the status of Kannada computing
on FreeBSD, Arun Sharma <arun@freebsd.org> says that there’s a tarball
available for those running current and wanting to try out the Indic support
on qt-3.2. This goes on top of kde-3.1.3 port on -current. http://www.sharma-home.net/~adsharma/misc/qt-3.2.1_1.tbz
It includes Sharma’s Kannada patch. Sharma confesses: "Still trying to
figure out why I can’t have UTF-8 filenames on FreeBSD. Does anyone have a definite
answer?"
Virtual University
The Virtual University for the Semi-Arid
Tropics offers information and learning materials, an e-library and working
documents. Oth-er resources will be made available soon. The project has been
initiated by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics
(ICRISAT) and the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF). See www.vusat.org
for more.
Chat in Malayalam
Dileep Kumar <dileep@kumarayil.net>
drew attention to this. He says that there is some great news for speakers of
Malayalam: they can now chat in their mother tongue. One should install Malayalam
GNU/Linux from smc.sarovar.org for enabling this facility.
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
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