Government plans open source policy for Digital India drive

Indian government has initiated open source code policy for all its Digital inclusive plans. This has been announced with a view on reducing costs and making it accessible. However, open source code indeed has its risks associated with it but  for now it will lead to millions of dollars in savings by moving away from proprietary systems.

The government is readying a policy that calls for open source software to be used as part of the Digital India initiative. The government is also planning to create a Github-like repository of software that can be collaboratively developed.

Github and SourceForge are popular internet repositories for software code that can be shared and revised by many people.

Experts feel that this will radically improve e-governance and add up significant savings as code and applications can be reused. Governments in India are expected to spend $6.4 bn on IT products and services in 2014, according to Gartner. The policy intends to speed up development and deployment of e-governance projects across various sectors in the government.

"Open source has offered us the best way to out of vendor lock-in and unpredictable financial commitments," said Jay Pullur, founder and CEO, Pramati Technologies, who is also part of software product think tank Ispirt.

According to an early version of the 'Policy On Collaborative Application Development by Opening the Source Code of Government Applications', the source code of hundreds of custom applications run by various government bodies is to be shared among government agencies and maintained in a common repository.

"The open code policy will ensure faster deployment of IT projects, speeding up the pace of innovation and reducing failure rates of projects," said Venkatesh Hariharan, director, Alchemy Business Solutions LLP, a company focused on technology for development in Indian language computing and open source education technology.

The repository will avoid duplication of applications and solutions to a large extent. For instance, a state wanting to adopt a particular application just has to go to the repository and customise it. "It is perverse that each state develops its own treasury application from scratch when it could be the same code," said Hariharan.

While open source experts agree that the policy is a step in the right direction, they caution that like most government initiatives, it would make a real impact only if implemented well. "Because open source is open code, you can rework on it, re-conceptualise it. And India would need a lot," said Parminder Jeet Singh, executive director at IT for Change.