 is the number of Akaas tablets that data when sent to IIT Rajasthan. 572 is the number of Akaas tablets which IIT Rajasthan distributed to multiple colleges. 19 is the number of colleges that got these tablets. That's it, right. The 100,000 number that we've been hearing about, nothing's happened so far. Why did I even got the contract? We don't know. We were competing for that particular contract, we don't know. There is a certain sense of obfuscation and lack of transparency in governments today that we're all dealing with, that we're all concerned about. And this data that you see on the slide over here is all stuff that we've received through RTI. We filed our first RTI in March last year and so I run a site called MediaNama. We've been writing about internet and mobile businesses for a while and we started focusing on policy about two, two and a half years ago because we felt that it was impacting businesses quite a bit. I was wondering, you know, when Zainab contacted me about why, about actually speaking at this conference and maybe putting up a proposal for something to talk about on RTI or data, this is a hacker's group, what will I do? I don't even code. But essentially we've been kind of doing hacking kind of journalism in a sense. We don't get access to information with a blog. So we try whatever means possible to try and get access to information and data. We go and check the registrar of companies and get data from them, which most journalists don't. We've been filing, we filed about 55 RTIs so far. That's not a very common thing among journalism organizations. And what we're finding is that there's such a wealth of data out there that you can collect through RTI. I'll share a couple of examples with you but there's this one more on this particular topic, this one more slide. We're wondering how much money's been given to DataVin for the ACAST outlet. And IIT, Rajasthan, so far, received 47.42 crore. They've given no money. So DataVin's distributed, has produced 640 tablets, got no money for it so far. And now the ACAST 2 is coming into production. What this data does is it allows us to ask questions about what's going on. And if you look at governments in this country, if you look at digital projects, every state is using digital projects. The government of Kerala is spending on mobile advertising and AdMob. I read that somewhere. We don't know how much they're spending. You may wonder about how this makes a difference but there is a sense that governments are not accountable to people. That in the last couple of years in particular that we've been sensing. So over here is about close to about 250 odd pages of information on the ACAST tablet that we've got from IIT, Rajasthan. This includes a tender that was issued. It includes DataVin's financial statements. It includes communications between DataVin and IIT, Rajasthan, on the tablet. So for us as a journalism, from a journalism perspective, this is incredibly useful. It takes a lot of time and effort and I still haven't been able to go through this. But we've got some crazy data so far from the Reserve Bank of India on the number of mobile banking transactions and we can see it's going nowhere so far. We've got data on the number of credit cards and debit cards and many of you who are in business, the way the payment ecosystem is evolving in India is extremely important. So we found that over the two-year period, ICICI advanced credit card base declined by 55%. That's private company data but it's with the government. So let's just answer some of the basic questions and we'll move into the Q&A pretty quickly. What can I get from the government? Any information which is not deemed either competitive or confidential, going against national security or given to the government by a foreign organization is available under RTI. There are instances where they might refuse to give you information and give you some cleansing grunts and there's an appeals process that you can follow in order to get someone higher up in the information hierarchy amongst the public information officers to direct the particular organization's information officer to give you that data. On a policy front, the IRD, the insurance regulator, formulated a policy which was extremely detrimental to web aggregators and refiled an RTI for the comments that had been submitted to the IRDA because what we heard from sources was that some of the policies that were implemented were not a part of the recommendations that were made. All recommendations that you make to a government body would effectively be available to you as citizens. The PRAI, for example, regularly puts up comments that are received from telecom operators or from citizens such as you and me on their website for anyone to see so that you know which way they're leaning and you can actually question why a particular policy decision was taken, why are they leaning in a particular direction when, let's say, most of the comments that they received were leaning towards another direction. So they can refuse to give information on a few grounds and even refuse information as well. I'll give you a little bit of a hack later on how to actually tackle some of these issues as well. In terms of who to get information from, there are state public information officers and there are central public information officers. Every government organization on its website is supposed to have a list of public information officers. So when you draft an RTI, you don't need to name someone also. Initially, we were sending RTI requests to the person who'd been named and government websites update their data so frequently that it turns out the person hadn't been there for about two years. And so then we realized we can just file it to the central public information officer or personal department and we got a response. You can get data from all government organizations. You can also try and get information and data from organizations that are getting government grants. NGOs are not necessarily, I don't think they're covered under the RTI, I'm not very sure of this, but there's no harm in trying. If you're looking for information, you can try various ministries that you think are maybe related to or coordinating with some organizations that are connecting information. Effectively, the government organizations are the people. So any information that they get should be accessible to us. And therefore, you should be in a position or you should feel that you can actually request this information and get it from them. Now, how do I get this data? It's an extremely simple process. All you have to do is just take a piece of paper, find the address of the department or the organization. Let's say if you're writing to MTNL or BSNL, file and just get the address of that particular organization right to the central PIO. Now, to get an RTI responded to, it costs you 10 rupees. All you have to do is just fill out your application, write down the questions that you need answered, go to your general post office, your GPO. Every GPO has a specific RTI desk. You can buy a 10 rupee postal order from there. What we've done is we've done the process for this. We've got, I think, about 200 rupees worth of postal orders with us at all times. And any time I need an RTI file, you just basically take a printout, attach a post order to it, go to the GPO which is fairly close to the viewer. And there's an RTI desk which actually helps you file that RTI. Now, not all departments, GPOs won't help you file that RTI desk won't necessarily deliver to all of these organizations. So sometimes you have to send it by speed force or by code. But the cost is fairly minimal compared to the, perhaps, the usefulness of the importance of the data that you're looking for. So how much will it cost? 10 bucks to file. But then if you need this much of data, it costs you 2 rupees per page. If you're getting lots and lots of data and you're trying to, let's say, get it from multiple organizations, refiled about 55 code RTI so far, that does add up. So this is the format. You're first, just do the CPI or the SPI or scripted address. Give your name and your address. Make a list of documents required or questions that you need them to answer. Just write that you are a citizen of India. Put in a date because they have to respond to you. And this is very important. They have to respond to you within 30 days of reception of that application. And the central PLO can get penalized if they don't respond in time. I don't think there'll be many instances of penalties being levied, but there are several instances where the response has been delayed for us. We're normally very patient. It doesn't, but there are, I think, one or two instances where we've got no response at all. But out of 55, in most cases, we've got the responses. Now, this is my favorite part of an RTI application. And you can take this from me. This particular statement which was given to me by CIS because they helped us file our first RTI. Quite often when you file an RTI with a particular department, they may not be the right department to answer that question. So the propensity is to respond to you and say, listen, I'm sorry. We're not the right place. So whoever it was who created this beautiful law in the goodness of his heart created a particular clause that said that if you are not the right authority to respond to this RTI, please forward it to the right one. So you don't even necessarily need to know who to file an RTI with. That's how great this law is. The second is about when you're just stating a claim that to the best of your knowledge, it's not restricted information. This is not necessary to put in, but if I don't even know why we put in, it's just legal speak, which again I don't understand that my friends helped me put in. So there are a couple of tricks that we've deployed so far. The first one is you give some proof that the information actually exists. So when I'm looking for data from the telecom regulator, I actively scout and I'm using search, I do a couple of tricks and try to figure out what are the... I look for Excel files for one because if they're seeking information from any organization, they typically put up Excel sheets that those organizations have to fill up and submit to them. So I know that if they are seeking that information and that Excel file exists, then they have the data. So it's almost like reverse engineering where you're seeing that they're collecting the information that is proof. So sometimes what we do is we take a printout of that sheet, we attach it to the document and say, this is Excel sheet on your site where you're collecting this information from these type of companies. Could you share the responses with us? The other is that sometimes they make statements in the press that indicate that certain information has been filed. So they can't deny the existence of that information. So in case of... We've done this extensively in case of the RBI in particular because they have the orders of data. There's so much out there that helps you make sense of what's going on. We had... When Airtel money launched, we wanted to figure out how they're doing and Airtel wasn't talking about... After the first month, no company will talk about how the business is performing in just one month's time. So we filed an RTI because they had a prepaid license with the RBI. We filed an RTI asking for data on their performance as well as its cash card, beam, there was something called Kaiser Automation. All of these are prepaid card services that help you make transactions. So we got about a year and a half of information. Airtel money, we just got one month of info. Something happened after that. We filed another RTI six months later to get a sense of how those organizations are actually performing. You know, has Airtel money taken off? Airtel will never say that the business has not taken off, right? But here we have data to check whether it has taken off or not. And the RBI refused to give us this information the second time saying it's confidential. So point number one, proof that the information exists. So the next filing, we photocopied the first RBI response we had with the same information and said, you had given this information to us at this time, now can you give us the updated information for the entire state of time? And we got it. Unfortunately, the data that we got from them isn't very reliable. We still haven't actually gone, you know, we haven't gone about filing an appeal or asking them to clarify because I think they showed Airtel's amount transacted going from 65 crore in one month to about 825 crore the next month, which is impossible. So the reliability of data is still an issue with RTI, but you at least have something to work with. The other part is that, you know, framing the questions. When you're looking for data, if you see the way we frame this particular question, right? This is for credit card transactions. The number and amount of transactions processed by a credit card segmented by issuing banks for each of the following channels for each month from this period to this period in brackets or up to the latest available date. So we don't want to leave any loopholes. So you're all coders and geeks, so you know how if, then, and all works, right? So try and figure out how is it that you can make sure that and logically put it in a manner to make sure that they don't not give you information. Whatever you can get might be worth it. The big question that we've been trying to answer is why? Why file an RTI? Why get this data, right? This is kind of philosophical, so you'll have to excuse me, but then I look at the way things are going on. There's just very little accountability in place in terms of governance. If there is a road that's not been fixed for a while, what do we do? We can file an RTI and ask for them to give us the schedule of road repair. We can ask them for information on who was responsible for getting the road done. And what are the penalties? When was the last time the road was built or fixed? What are the penalty clauses put in so that that road, if that road would then get spoiled because of rain or whatever, how much penalty would be levied? Ask them about how much penalty has been levied so far. If a contract is given to a particular organization, that's the case of the Aghaas Tablet. What were the grounds of this contract? There are some people in government who are saying that RTI is delaying decision making or delaying the rollout of projects because they're continuously questioning these decisions. But effectively, we are tax fined. It's our right to question. At this point in time, this is the only law in the country that allows you to hold your government accountable. And I think it's about time more and more people started using it. It's been there since 2005. There are not enough people using it because we don't know how to use it. And we think it's cumbersome to do this. It's not. It's the easiest thing to do to file an RTI. There's a friend of mine. His wife had applied for a passport. It got delayed. And when they went to the passport office, they were asking for a flight. He filed an RTI asking for why the passport has been delayed. They have to respond within 30 days. Two weeks later, they got the passport. Four weeks later, they got a letter saying the passport has already been delivered. Right? For me, this is my favorite story. This is my favorite RTI story. It's a friend of mine who's actually benefited from this. So every time you feel that it's a pain to deal with government, every time you feel that you get angry about something that's not happening, that you think is not being done right, ask questions. Media organizations are filters. We choose what we think is important during the greater common goal. But for me, I like a situation where all of you start filing RTIs. I like a situation where, and this is something which I wanted to propose, an idea, create a platform where you can identify issues. You can create an RTI then and there. You can collaborate. So with this Akaan Standard, we asked 21 questions. Who asked 21 questions? We just filed it. What we did was, I had five questions to ask. I didn't know what else to ask. So I just created a Google Doc. Put it on Twitter saying this, and I'm filing an RTI in the Akaan Standard. Go and I get questions if you think this is relevant. We got 21 questions. Collectively, we're all more intelligent. Probably individually as well. But if all of us, if well-meaning citizens get together, start using this. Start creating RTIs. Start asking questions of government. For us, we want to start with data and we want to focus on getting information on the digital industry because there's a national optic fiber network being rolled out. There are several government projects. In Punjab, the common service center, the contracts were canceled all of a sudden. No one knows why. Money was spent on those things. Our money was spent on those things. No one knows why. If we start asking these questions, we'll get more information. There might be people who are head more accountable. The other issue is that there are instances where where RTI activists are being killed across the country. If all of us start finding RTIs, who will they go after? If all of us start asking for information, who will they kill? If it's public, so there is one issue about RTI and copyright. Data received under RTI is under copyright. My sense is no government information should be under copyright because it's paid for by the citizens of this country. The copyright act which was passed earlier this year, our submission to the government on that was that it's all software, all data that's with the government should be free to use. I don't see why CDAC should actually charge people for Indian language forms, for example. But that's what happens. They're monetizing, they're asking us to pay for the stuff that we're already paying for creating. So the data that we put up under RTI is under copyright. I'm not sure if a scan of these responses are going to be under copyright. I'd say that create that platform that allows you to share RTI responses so that if I'm looking for certain information, looking for certain answers, it's there on the web. So collaborate, it's like for me, it's Wikipedia the ultimate model, it's like Wikipedia for RTI. Unfortunately, I don't know how to code it so if anyone wants to talk to me and ideate on what we can build so that everyone can use it, let's do that. The other idea that I have, and this is not related to data in any way, is about participatory governance. Today, there are public policy consultations taking place in just about every department. The way they work, and we saw this first with the IT rules, the Internet censorship or the intermediary rules that they passed in April last year despite several complaints and they still haven't revoked even though it was brought up for discussion in parliament. They still haven't revoked it. What they did was that they just gave 10 days for people to respond to it. For an ordinary citizen like me, for me to first go through the whole thing, try and understand law and then respond to it. It's extremely difficult. And this is just one rule. There are several laws that have created that impact all of us. What do we do? So there's a department, what do we do? If you see a small advertisement in a non-discret newspaper that none of us will notice, there will be people in the industry who directly get impacted by it, who have contacts in the government, who will get to know that this is going to come. They might even get the copies of the consultation paper even before it gets made public to all of us. And they get to respond, whereas our views, because we either don't know about it or we don't have enough time for it, they don't get hurt. So how do you then deal with that situation? I'd say that let's form a group, let's participate, let's create a list of all the consultations in various sectors that are going on. And let's give our views. They may be taken into account, they may not be taken into account, but if you have strong views on something, they could be. I submitted for the copyright bill, one of the points that I raised, maybe others had also raised it, that got incorporated into the law. I'd submitted to the Standing Committee on IT on corruption in the media. I was called for a public policy consultation on that issue. It's another thing that the views, they didn't quite hear my views on that, but there are instances where the government will actually ask you to come and participate. I submitted my comments as an individual, and all of you can also participate. We don't have jury duty in India, but this is one way of making a difference if you want to. So for me, the name for this is the Open Policy Project. Let's just open up governance. Let's get data and let's try to understand why certain decisions are being taken. Let's try and get involved in governance because things have been going downhill for the last five, six years, and we've seen we have to do something about it. The media will raise issues, I'm part of the media in that sense, but we raise issues and then it's very difficult for us to continue staying with an issue and keep hopping on it or keep going after it. We have to pick our battles in that sense, but we can all pick our battles and fight them because we get impacted by this. So don't let the idealism die. We can collectively bring about change. Thank you. What matter that you get data? Is it always on paper? Oh, I forgot to say this. This is the tricky part. When you get data from the government, it's in printouts. So we had four years of month on month, four years of data on credit card transactions and amount transacted for 54 banks in printouts or Excel sheets. Even though we had asked, we had specifically requested them to send us a digital copy. So only one department so far has, two departments so far have sent us digital copies, but even then we have asked for digital copies. They still make us paper page. So to answer your question, you need a data entry operator in many instances or many of them. I think you need a mic. Can an organization file an RTI request towards an individual? So far, I mean, we'd like to file an organization, but I've been told that it needs to be an individual. Quite often, organizations don't want to take on the mandate of filing an RTI and maybe taking on the government as well. So individuals with this, it's on your head. What if someone doesn't respond in that 30 days? You can file an appeal with the applet authority. So on the website, there's typically an applet authority identified. Also, if you're not happy with the response that you get, you can still file an RTI or you can still file an appeal. So with the IRDA, and I forgot to complete that one, first time they refused to tell us, they refused to give us the information saying that the policy finalization is still under progress. So before the policy is finalized, they cannot give us the information, which is patiently wrong. But we file an appeal after that and then for the same comments and they responded to us saying that the policy had been finalized, but they still did not give us the information. So we file an appeal again, saying that they hadn't given it and then they gave us about, I think, 150 or pages of comments that we still have to go through. What about the consequence of filing RTI? Like, if I want to file RTI against my own organization and later they fired me due to that and said that you had signed on a paper any time we can hire you on any ground without citing any reason. So what about that? That's a consequence you have to deal with. I don't know. You'll have to talk to a lawyer on how to deal with that situation. So RTI will lead with that? Absolutely. But you have to bear the consequences, right? We can be organizations who refuse to talk to us because we're trying to make that data. And there have been instances where we've got, so not RTI but other data that we've got from the public data which you've got from the government and put up. We've even noticed some companies saying you can't make this information public. So I've had to ask a lawyer friend to respond to me and say, well, we can. And lawyers have responded, then lawyers have responded back and after that no one said anything so everything's all good. But the situations where they say that we can do this without citing any reason. Can we file RTI for that also? You can file RTI without giving any reason. You don't have to give a reason. You just have to ask for the information. That's it. I really like the sound of the open policy project. I'm wondering if you can talk about that a little bit more in a second related question about any examples you know of people actually using RTI sort of more creatively within some kind of activist or advocacy framework or projects, things like that if you have any information about that. So to answer your second question first I'm only aware of what my organization's been doing and a few related organizations have been doing. Don't know if we've been creative but we've tried to get answers whenever possible. We started out, for example, when we learned that certain websites had been blocked and we filed an RTI at the Center for International Society here in Bangalore. They filed an RTI and we both worded our questions differently so that if they don't respond to us, they respond to them. So they were given the data. We were given the data. But as such, I don't know about creatively. It depends. So for me, getting the information out is important. You can word your RTI application in different ways to try and get it. You can file multiple RTIs in different names if you can ask a friend and try and get the same information out because for many government organizations the propensity is to refuse to give information. But in many cases, they want to give information because they think it's helpful. So even with policy whenever we've interacted with government departments for some instances, they said, you know, we like what you guys are doing. And in other cases, they just don't want to talk to us. We're going to have to decide. I'm going to have to cut you off. We have to get ready for the next one. But please continue questions to get killed. Yeah. Because we have to set up. We're cutting all the certificates for each of 25 minutes. But please continue asking questions. So can you set up while we discuss? Yeah. It's fine, but you know, I need to make a step. I can start. So how about this? Why didn't you ask for the census data which is charged normally? Ask for it under RTL. Let's see what happens. I'm saying, you know, these are artificial barriers that need to be broken up. It's our data. You know, a lot of this is about challenging the status quo and I'm saying let's go and challenge it. If they're charging for a table, let's ask for the same data under RTL and let's see what happens. There's one government organization which has one law called RTL. If you used to give you data because they're actually trying to commercialize that data, I don't think so. So let's see. Let's have a piece of it. You have to... No, they can. They can do that. You are required to pay. Two rupees per page. Then they won't give it to you. You can also request to go and see the documents in the office. You can then ask for printouts for whatever you want. No, this is very important. They don't give you this copy. That's the problem. You can go and see. Amending the law is going to take four more years and the problem with amending laws is that when they're amended, they've already seen the damage that the RTL can do to them, right? This is the best part of the law. I don't think they saw how powerful this is and they passed it thinking it's well... No. We've asked for it. Never been given. No. We've asked them. We said we'll pay for the CDs. I don't want to spend 15, 20 days having someone type out all those tables. I'll pay for it. Sorry. Here. You know, I'll try that. So far, I've only asked every single time. Amending, there's a way to use this law to keep very up-to-date information on the website or somewhere where, say, the road example that you said. If you have a site which can have all the schedule for road repair, it's updated. There is a department in Hyderabad that's actually doing, that has a website where all of this information is tracked, but it's all internal. But I don't think there's any... You'll have to file a method. You know, this is what we can do. We can actually start putting stuff about road repair. Bombay needs it. Every time it rains, the whole city gets flooded like crazy. Bombay needs it more than anything, but they don't hold the government accountable. They'll keep BMCs, the richest municipal corporation and the country. Who holds the BMC accountable today? In the absence of PINs being filed, so... On the basis of APIs? No, no, no. To give, to make, to force the government to give data and a format to do this. I mean, it could be amicable. No, I don't think... You cannot be argued that, you know, it's an impediment. It restricts the flow of information if you don't give it. So in the real process, if you're not argued that it must be instilled. For it to be... See, this is why I like this. I'm getting ideas. We'll do that. There is a law, a policy going through that's going to standardize data formats and stuff. But that hasn't been... I'm not sure what the status is of that. But when you get to local data, that's not mutualized yet. It's not even going to be there. It's all going to be on a bunch of word gaps or maybe stuff. If you're lucky. They'll print it out. They'll print it out. Yeah, so they give you printouts of access. But one of the things is that the government has an open data project. They partake of the U.S. government, and he's talking about something, the C2 NCI of the U.S. government. They were in India. They started the project. There was a small announcement where they said that the project is ready and the Indian and U.S. governments together launched it. And we don't know what's happened with that. The data sets will be available so that they have asked every ministry to standardize the top five data sets that they have. They're due to come this month or next to be delivered to the platform. And then they have a year scheduled to get the rest. But there's... It's important to the national data accessibility shared policy. There's three kinds of data that will be available, accessible, restricted and not shareable. We have no idea what they'll share. They can easily put all their data under not shareable. They can even... It's not tied to RTI in any way. And so... But this directive says you have to put your top five, whatever that means, to the ministry, on downloadable from free. Now the policy says that they can charge... It doesn't have to be downloadable. It can be in whatever formats they want. But these five, the census is not there. The national sample survey is not there. So a lot of the really valuable data won't be on this platform. But we'll see in three months or whenever... Well, the way I would look at it is that if they don't make the data available, then we should. That's why this has stopped fighting and getting at my data. It turns out that what is happening is that it's a kind of easy-to-data policy based on national data sharing. Yeah. So what happens is that the digital data policy standardizes the... of the data that we share. Who gets to host the data? Which is a nice clue. But our ministries have to share it. There will be people who will not host the data on that platform. The ministry will host the data. The metadata will be on that platform. Especially regarding whether there will be one open data platform. Or the central open data platform is only giving links to this. But the thing is that there isn't enough of an opportunity or a dialogue between these two policies. And this thing is also... This needs to move beyond data as well. It needs to move into governance. Data is a great indicator. But you also need to question certain actions. So sometimes we don't even know what the policy is. Like if you look at DOIP, the TRS has issued some recommendations on DOIP in 2008. And if you spoke to the ISPs and the ISPA website itself had the TRIA recommendations as the applicable policy. And everyone was using that. They were doing business using that policy. And everyone would speak but they wouldn't have any proof. So we fired an RTI for the applicable policy of DOIP. And it turned out nothing has changed.