Dear all, As a self-appointed armchair activist, I believe that the free-flow of information (specially that which is of vital importance to our lives) is vital for any society to work efficiently, transparently and if you want even a bit less undemocratically.
>From the enclosed information procured under the Right to Information, it is clear that Goa is facing an odd situation where all the laws which govern the citizen are not available for sale for anyone wanting to purchase them from the Government Printing Press. See the official information emerging, via these scanned documents on Flickr.com (a listing of laws in force in Goa currently not available for sale in the Government Printing Press, Panjim, apart from other information): * http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=2005561364&size=l * http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=2005590398&size=l * http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=2005604808&size=l * http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=2005627008&size=o * http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=2004848015&size=l Given the mismatch between demand and supply, and the inability (specially by government officials) to predict these adequately, it appears that such a situation would arise every now and then. In this context, the Government Printing Press should perhaps take a decision to convert all its paper-based laws into PDF files and place them in cyberspace, for easy download by the citizen, as and when needed. This could sort out the situation at a very low cost to the government, and to the satisfaction of all citizens. In fact, such a policy should extend beyond just laws. All the publications of the Government Printing Press, not just its laws, need to be available for free download via cyberspace. After all, if there is no additional (or extremely low) unit cost to share information collated/published at the taxpayers' cost, then there is a good case for it to be made freely downloadable. In fact, I was a bit surprised that inspite of so many costly computers being deployed at the Government Printing Press (many with costly TFT -- thin film transistor or LCD -- screens too), the documents given to me were handwritten! This makes it more difficult to share with others in an online world ... FN PS: The second part of the query, dealing with Portuguese books available for sale at the GPP was tagged on out of my personal interest. As you might know, I collect books on Goa, and many of the old titles are very inexpensively priced (unlike some recent reports, which officialdom might not be very interested in making widely available -- like the Batta Report into the Marks Scam of the 1980s, for instance). -- Frederick Noronha http://fn.goa-india.org Ph 0091-832-2409490 12000+ downloadable, sharable hi-res photos http://www.flickr.com/photos/fn-goa/
