[Talk-in] Request for comments

[Ajay Shah]

I wrote a column which I intend to publish on the edit page of
Financial Express. The text is ahead. Will be great if you guys could
give me comments.





What should government do? To economists, there is a technical answer:
government should raise money through taxes, and spend it on the
provision of `public goods'. A public good is "non-rival" (i.e. the
use by one person does not preclude the use by another) and
"non-excludable" (it is not possible to prevent an additional person
from benefiting from the public good).

While there are shades of gray in rivalness and excludability, public
goods are the zone where government involvement in the economy is
legitimate. Protection from war, for example, is a pure public
good. When an army is setup which protects the population, it is
non-rival (the safety of one person imposes no cost on another) and
non-excludable (it is impossible to prevent a newborn child from
benefiting from this safety).

An important pure public good is map data. Maps are rival: when I am
looking at a map, you can't simultaneously look at the same map. But
map data is a public good. If that data is created once and released
into the public domain, then myriad private players can use it to
create maps, GPS based navigation systems, etc. The job of the
government, then, is to run the Survey of India, which is funded by
taxes, which creates high quality maps data, and releases databases on
the website for free download.

Unfortunately, in India, we do everything wrong. Survey of India maps
are grossly outdated. On the website, they proudly say: "We know every
inch of the Nation, because we map every inch of it". However, in good
countries, 1:24,000 topo sheets are trustworthy, while Survey of India
does not even have good quality 1:250,000 topo sheets. The weakest
link about Survey of India is the rules of release. Survey of India is
funded by taxpayer money. As a consequence, the information that they
create should be freely released back into the public domain for
unencumbered use. Instead, Survey of India thinks like a
corporation. It has "licensing" restrictions which has effectively
made their data unusable.

The most important maps in India today are produced by google. Google
maps and google earth are a remarkable combination of satellite
imagery and maps, and they are available for free (!). Google has had
to reconstruct maps of India from scratch, thanks to the legal
problems (and low quality of work) of Survey of India. It is ironic
that even though taxpayers are funding Survey of India, this work is
useless for the people of India, who are flocking to google maps and
google earth. Nokia has also created good maps of India, which are
usable through some Nokia handsets (only).

The only flaw with google maps and google earth is that the underlying
databases are the private property of google. What would be most
desirable is for maps data to be a public good, which can be used in
all manner of ways by all individuals and companies. As an example,
handheld GPS devices are now available for $100. If these are loaded
with Indian map data, they can be immensely useful tools for
navigation, exploration and business efficiency. Google does not give
out their map database to the public, so such applications are
infeasible.

Until Survey of India gets its act together, the solution lies with a
public domain initiative named `openstreetmap'. This uses
Internet-scale collaboration to build maps. It involves volunteers,
armed with handheld GPS devices, who are feeding in maps data into a
central database. This database is a true public good. The licensing
conditions of openstreetmap are quite open, though not as open as
those used by the US government. Openstreetmap is doing what Survey of
India should have done: accumulating high quality maps data and
releasing it into the (mostly) public domain.

Thus, three strategies are now in play in India: a high quality
solution which is a public goods effort (openstreetmap), a good
solution which is owned by a corporation (google) and a poor solution
which acts like a corporation (Survey of India). The users of maps are
flocking to google, Nokia and openstreetmap.

>From the viewpoint of the government, the first best strategy is to
shift Survey of India into the mode of uncompromisingly releasing maps
data into the public domain, matching the release strategy of the US
government on openness. Through this, the government would continue to
engage in taxpayer-funded efforts at creating maps databases, but the
full benefits would come back to the people of India. In addition,
Survey of India needs to get up to timely 1:24000 coverage of the full
country. If these changes are infeasible, it is better to shut down
Survey of India, and transfer its annual budget to openstreetmap, for
the latter is producing public goods while the former is acting like
an inefficient corporation.

-- 
Ajay Shah                                      http://www.mayin.org/ajayshah  
ajayshah at mayin.org                             http://ajayshahblog.blogspot.com
<*(:-? - wizard who doesn't know the answer.