Common people, acting

collaboratively, are a wonderful source

of public good

Madhav Gadgil

My ears perked up during a lively rendition of the Lungi Dance by my granddaughters, for
the words ran: Gharpe jaake tum Google kar lo, mere baare me Wikipidia pe padhlo! So, Wikipedia,
which has become such a fantastic source of information and enjoyment for me over the last few
years, is now a part of popular culture! This is incredible, because Wikipedia goes against all the
tenets of the votaries of market economy who had confidently predicted fourteen years ago that this
non-profit, voluntary experiment was bound to fail.
The Wiki software that permits building up of information in a collaborative fashion is a
remarkable innovation, and its creator, Ward Cunningham, could have made lots of money by
patenting it. Instead, he made it freely available, opening up enormous possibilities. Encyclopedias,
centuries-old compendia of knowledge, have traditionally been expert-driven and commercially
produced. But with the World-Wide-Web flowered concepts such as Creative Commons, a platform
for people who wish their creations texts, pictures, music to be freely and publicly available,
not only to enjoy, but to change, augment, improve. This is a process of positive feedback, with
creations and creativity growing from strength to strength. According to market devotees, Creative
Commons, starved of the waters of private profit, should have forever remained barren. But over the
years it has become a lush garden, tended lovingly by people who can see well beyond personal
gain.
Wikipedia is the great Banyan tree, growing in this public garden. The initial free, public
Encyclopedia, Nupedia, composed by experts, failed to take off. Experts are busy people, generally
with a strong personal profit motive, and initially failed to take the lead in this public-spirited
endeavour. It was then that Wikipedia boldly decided that any lay person too would be welcome to
contribute to an article on any topic, provided that the inputs are based on acceptable sources of
information. People, especially experts, enjoy nothing more than pointing out other peoples
mistakes, so an excellent way of arriving at valid information on the Internet is to begin by posting
some, possibly erroneous information.
Rigorous scrutiny
Wikipedia invites all comers to scrutinise every piece of information in every article,
eliminate errors and improve its quality. This stimulated experts who now participate
enthusiastically in the inclusive, egalitarian enterprise of Wikipedia. In this new culture of the

Commonwealth of Knowledge, experts have graduated from the earlier overpowering, monopolistic
role to a very constructive one of collaboration and guidance. So, Wikipedia has become a standard
source of information even for professional mathematicians, with the material, naturally enough,
based on inputs from practising mathematicians. They have gone on to collaboratively develop
outstanding mathematical text-books as Wikibooks.
The gratifying outcome is that the accuracy of information on Wikipedia, on a par with that
in commercial encyclopedias, has been maintained even as its quantity has grown a thousand times
over that of commercial ones. Moreover, the information is very much up to date. Within hours of
the tsunami hitting the east coast of India, Wikipedia carried authentic pictures and information on
the event. Happily, all major Indian languages now have their own Wikipedias, with more than half a
lakh articles each in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.
Common people, acting collaboratively, are a wonderful source of public good. Regretfully,
experts, when assigned a monopolistic role, can abuse public interest. Goas Mines and Geology
Department is expected to regularly inspect mines, maintain proper data and ensure that mining
operations do not impose undue environmental and social costs. Yet, the Shah Commission Report
on Illegal Mining in Goa records that no inspection was carried out of iron ore mines as required
under the Act, resulting in damage to the ecology, environment, agriculture, ground water, ponds,
rivers, and biodiversity. The commission squarely puts the blame for such damage on many official
experts. My own studies document that experts from private organisations have been guilty of
deliberately falsifying information in the Environmental Impact Assessments of mines.
Creation of knowledge
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, an exercise of compiling available knowledge. But new
knowledge, too, may be created very effectively in the same inclusive culture of collaboration, for
common people know a great deal from their experience. I discovered a striking example of this in
my field research on ecology and management of bamboos. The Foresters prescribed that the thorny
covering at the base of bamboo clumps must be cleared to decongest the clumps and promote better
growth of new culms. The villagers told me that this was a mistake; that clearing the thorns exposed
new shoots to grazing by cattle as well as wild animals, adversely impacting the bamboo stocks.
Three years of careful field studies revealed that the villagers were entirely right.
So, systematically recording such detailed location and society specific knowledge can be of
immense value. The Australians, for instance, have a Citizens River Watch Programme involving
local residents who adopt nearby river stretches for keeping a watch over them. The government
arranges two-day training programmes for all those interested, communicating simple techniques of
assessing water flow and water quality. The water quality assessments are based on occurrence of
animals like damselflies that occur only in clean water or chironomids that frequent highly polluted
waters. Numerous volunteer observers upload such data employing user-friendly online data entry
forms. This data is open to scrutiny and correction by all concerned. Such citizen scientist data has

by now generated an excellent knowledge base of the state of rivers of Australia. Such a rich
database could never have been created by experts acting by themselves; there are too few of them,
they are expensive, and assigning a monopolistic role to them is dangerous. Moreover, involving all
interested citizens in collecting and scrutinising the data ensures that errors, including deliberate
falsifications, are quickly noticed and eliminated. The world over, such Citizen Science projects are
now taking root. It is such Citizen Science that the people of Kerala should now pioneer, with the
stone quarries as the focus, for the official agencies have no proper database on these allegedly
largely illegal, environmentally-destructive and socially-abusive activities. After all, it was in Kerala
that scientists began to break the stranglehold of official agencies through an open, transparent
exercise of conducting an environmental and techno-economic assessment of the Silent Valley
Project.
Now, in the new millennium, a cadre of volunteers can readily put together a quarries
database since the easily available GPS instruments pinpoint geographical locations, and satellite
images bring out patterns of land use including quarrying, the watercourse that the quarries
affect, the landslides that they trigger, the fields and plantations that they smother. Local residents
can involve themselves by speedily collecting pertinent physical data, as well as detailed information
on employment generated, other economic, social, health impacts and on matters like whether the
concerned gram sabhas support or oppose the enterprises. If organisations like the Kerala Sastra
Sahitya Parishat and Vigyan Bharathi make such an effort their mission, a rich reliable information
base can be put together in as short a time as a few weeks.
Of course, this ought to have been already under way. The Biological Diversity Act, 2002,
mandates all Panchayat Bodies to develop Peoples Biodiversity Registers that would include many of
the elements sketched above. Noting that first-hand observations on environmental parameters
would be an excellent educational tool, the Central Advisory Board on Education had strongly
endorsed a programme of using student Environmental Education projects throughout the country to
develop such databases as early as 2005, as did the Approach Paper for the Eleventh Five Year Plan.
But these formal provisions have been of no avail for our rulers believe in what Tao Te Ching, the
Chinese manual of Statecraft preached two thousand four hundred years ago: The ancients who
practised the way did not enlighten people with it; they used it, rather to stupefy them; the people
are hard to rule when they have too much knowledge. Therefore, ruling a state through knowledge
is to rock the state. Ruling a state through ignorance brings stability to the state.
The citizens of the world are now ready to rock many of the thoroughly mismanaged boats of
our nation-states. Peoples taking charge of the knowledge enterprise should be one of the steps in
such a revolution. So, let Kerala pioneer the Citizen Science approach, focusing on a significant issue
of the day the stone quarries disfiguring the mountains of Gods own country.
(The writer was chairman, Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel. Email: madhav.gadgil@gmail.com)