The solution should better be called e-Administration. It received an award from the Deputy Prime Minister of India. The basic version can be made free. We can discuss more, if you have any ideas on how to go about it.
Thanks.
Krishnan V D G
Congratulations! Please do release your application as free software. www.gnu.org explains how it could be done. Briefly, by free we mean releasing the source code under the GPL.
Regards, K. Ramanraj.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Ramanraj K" ramanraj@md4.vsnl.net.in To: fsf-friends@mm.gnu.org.in Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2003 10:14 AM Subject: [Fsf-friends] Paths of Freedom
To, Mr. V D G Krishnan
President & CEO LL2B.COM Pvt Ltd
Dear Mr. V.D.G. Krishnan,
The message copy received by me is not clear to me.
First a pointer to where we are: Please visit http://gnu.org.in/pipermail/fsf-friends/2003-October Ofcourse, we are now in November, but I have given you last month's archive address so that you will find your mail listed there at the bottom, and you can relate to what is happening around.
On our part, we have developed a e-governance and e-transparency solution which is now under trials at Electronics Corporation of Tamilnadu
(ELCOT),
Govt. of Tamilnadu Undertaking. This tool is expected to bring in total transparency and speed to the working of the Govt. We hope it will be adopted as a tool by the Govt. of Tamilnadu.
You can visit WWW.LL2B.COM for the preliminary details.
e-governance and e-transparency solutions are most welcome. But then, the solution itself should also be free, open and transparent. The philosophy section at http://www.gnu.org explains free software. Law itself is public, free and open in nature. Our Supreme Court had the occasion in Naresh v. State of Maharashtra [AIR 1967 SC 1] to consider the merits of open and public trials for "healthy objective and fair administration of justice," and quoted Bentham with approval as follows:
"In the darkness of secrecy, sinister interest, and evil in every shape, have full swing. ... Publicity is the very soul of justice. It is the keenest spur to exertion, and the surest of all guards against improbity. It keeps the Judge himself while trying under trial in the sense that the security of securities is publicity."The principles laid are equally true for governance. Without free software, it is hard to even imagine a e-governance software.
But, I am personally wary of using the expression "e-governance software".
The law is the common background for all human activity. Besides governance, law operates upon a large area. Governance is specially grouped under the heading Constitutional Law and Administrative Law. We have Law of Contracts, Torts, Law of Property, Family Law, Labour Law etc. wherein "governance" is minimal or even totally absent. If an application can handle Constitutional Law and Administrative Law, then there are no reasons why it should not handle the Law of Contracts or the other laws. We have people designing "banking software", "insurance software", "billing software", as though the law has these water tight compartments. We have ERP, CRM, B2B, B2C, G2G, G2B, etc. etc, with others promising to integrate ERP with CRM, CRM with the rest in all possible permutations and combinations. It makes business sense but no legal sense.
Can any e-governance software check constitutionality of code? If they can't, then they better not call themselves by such a name.
Besides, consider the following:
Suppose an e-governance application wants to assist litigants in filing plaints. While automating preparation of plaints, some issues arise. If more than one plaintiff sues, the script should use "plaintiffs" otherwise, "plaintiff". In appeals, for the same reason it chooses between "appellants" and "appellant". Soon, a function that would give the plural for singular nouns like applicant, petitioner, claimant, defendant, and respondent becomes necessary. This exercise soon takes one to examining the rules of English grammar. If an application can handle legal rules well, then it might handle rules of English grammar as well. But the most singular difficulty would be in listing the rules of English grammar. Tamil has Agathiam (the primary grammar text, but no longer in vogue) > Tholkappiam (Secondary text, based on Agathiam), and > finally the recent Nanool, where everything from how letters are formed, classified, pronounced, to usage, root words, verbs, concatanation, and every thing necessary to use the language are dealt with thoroughly. Assuming that after consensus, acceptable rules of English grammar for the present are available, we could write functions such as:
function get_plural($singlular){ // returns plural for a given singular .... }To write a perfect get_plural function, we need to know if the word passed to the function is a noun or not. Now, we have to write
function is_noun($word){ // returns if word is a noun .... }As you see, one thing leads to another, and soon we will have a large library of functions that deal with many aspects of English grammar. Then our scripts will write well, and may be read well too.
Once we write such a library, there is no reason why this should be confined to just an "e-governance" application. We could use it even better in the field of education or wherever English is used.
Consider another scenario.
Recently, an ONGC helicopter crashed into the sea near Mumbai, and an Enquiry has been ordered into it. The survivor & eye witnesses reported that the helicopter went into a spin before crashing into the sea. It is well known that the tail propellor prevents a helicopter from spinning. Did the tail propellor fail? We see that the enquiry soon has to deal with the basic workings of an helicopter to arrive at the truth for the cause of the accident. Though at the top level, things look like "e-governance", as we go deep, we find ourselves into the thick of rules of English grammar, the laws of aerodynamics, history, or other fields of human knowledge.
Ancient sages dealt exhaustively on grammar, philosophy, ethics, medicine, law, science and literature single handedly. Agathiar wrote Agathiam creating a script for Tamil, codifing the rules of grammar, and then dealt with medicine [Paripooranam 400], and initiated Girivalam, as the simplest form of yoga, that could be practiced by one and all. Agathiar is believed to have brought his first love, River Cauvery, to Tamil Nadu. Well, then he might have organised the flow of the River with the aid of the local kings. Patanjali wrote upon Sanskrit Grammar, Ayurveda and Yoga, and though the works stand distinctively, a common thread unites them. A unity at some point is required for scientific progress and human prosperity.
Free software offers all the tools we can ask for. The next big step would be when human knowlege is ported across so that software applications abound with life, intelligence and wisdom.
Regards, K. Ramanraj.