Around 31 years ago somewhere across the T.V. airwaves, Minister for Administrative Affairs Mr. James George Hacker had tried to implement an ‘Open Government’ project which was unfortunately sabotaged by Permanent Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby. However in the words of he who I cannot remember, “you can never kill an idea”. Image from here.
Anyway getting down to the point of it all, we hope to kick off our own ‘Open Government’ project. The very simple, unambitious objective of our little endeavour is to start putting out on in the public domain entire government files pertaining to intellectual property legislations, both parliamentary and delegated. The idea is basically to trace the development of the legislation up until it became a law.
(ii) As a people, we Indians have no idea how the Government actually makes legislations. Once we have access to actual government files and most importantly ‘file notings’ we will begin to understand the degree of competence or incompetence with which our governments make law. As we are about to discover it is but clear that most government legislation is outsourced to private persons or firms. This is in keeping with the transparency mandate of our blog.
(i) Part I
(ii) Part II
(iii) Part III
(iv) Part IV
Hopefully we should have all IP legislations up on the website in atleast one year, that is, if the government co-operates with us. If not we could be looking at a pretty long haul. Of course if any of our readers in Delhi could pick up and scan some of the files we would be much obliged.
Glad to learn that SpicyIP is making an effort to kick start the Open Government Project!