Arthapedia's users rechristen it Orthopedia

The launch of Arthapedia by the learned members of the Indian Economic Service to give outsiders an Internet-enabled Rosetta Stone to decode jargon is revolutionary in concept, not in execution.

Governments worldwide have prided themselves in keeping their affairs comprehensively out of the ambit of the public simply by the denseness of their prose. By the time the layman negotiated the commas and abbreviations, qualifications and subparas, the plot (and line of thought) was well and truly lost.

Erudite officials may earnestly want their esoteric cerebrations to be accessible, but any great task is easier said than done. Unfortunately, Arthapedia, while claiming and aiming to "simplify indigenous concepts" has not been able to rise above its content creators' penchant for multi-syllable words and convoluted sentences.

In fact, some precepts leave the reader literally blank - like the currently empty page titled 'uncategorised category'.

The focus, though, seems to be on expansivity and exhaustivity rather than brevity or clarity. Why else would its elaboration of 'factory' as defined by our Factories Act be a 75-word sentence that includes four mentions of 'working' and two each of 'workers', 'manufacturing process', 'power', 'wherein' and 'is/was', besides the usual overdose of prepositions?

It is no more simply elucidated than the original definition in officialese. It could be argued that some target users of the site (namely, "academicians, economists, policy practitioners, financial journalists, students") would be used to obtuse and abstruse intellection.

But for the sake of the rest of that list - "any interested citizen both within the country and abroad" - Arthapedia should take Henry David Thoreau's advice: Simplify, simplify!