Royalty and RTI

IN the digital age, the implementation of the Right to Information Act, 2005, is deeply linked to the technology that will be adopted to store public documents and information in digital formats. Thus, the National Policy on Open Standards in E-Governance is critical to ensure reliable long-term accessibility to public information, wrote RTI activists, under the aegis of the National Campaign for Peoples Rights to Information (NCPRI), in a letter to the Department of Information Technology (DIT).

FOSS activists have opposed the demands made by industry bodies to allow adoption of multiple and royalty-based technological standards, which will determine the access and affordability of future public e-services. NCPRI working committee members Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey, Shekhar Singh, Maja Daruwalla and Venkatesh Nayak, who are among the prominent signatories to this letter, term it an attempt to subvert the intent of the policy. They point out that it is antithetical to the spirit of the RTI.

Appreciating the progressive line taken by the DITs original draft policy, the letter states that the industry demand will deny long-term accessibility to public documents and information, benefit licence/patent holders and create (or retain) monopolies for software products.

In obtaining public information through the Act, multiple and royalty-based standards could be problematic on two counts. The citizen will have to use multiple pieces of software (possibly from different companies) to access government data or interact with public service providers. Incorporating royalty-based standards will also involve costs that may have to be borne by the data user (in this case the RTI applicant).

Recognising the importance of digital systems in making public information easily accessible, Section 4 (1) of the RTI Act requires governments to ensure that all records that are appropriate to be computerised are, within a reasonable time and subject to availability of resources, computerised and connected through a network all over the country on different systems so that access to such records is facilitated. Activists fear that if the software standard allows for proprietary software, for which royalties may have to be paid, access to these services may migrate to a pay-and-use model.

Deepa Kurup