Similarly, Himachal governments online land record system, HimBhoomi, too is on a Microsoft platform. The HimBhoomi computerization of land records is in all 110 Tehsils of HP. Himachal IT secretary, Sanjeev Gupta says, "As far as choosing technology is concerned, Himachal Pradesh will go with vendors who give technological commercial solutions. Decisions on purchases are purely going to be made on solutions offered. We would not like to bind ourselves to any one technology, and would like to follow open standards. At present most of the applications run on Microsoft."

Another significant win for Microsoft has been the Lokvani project in Uttar Pradesh, a single window e-Governance solution providing transparent, accountable and responsive administration for grievance handling, land record maintenance as well as an eclectic mixture of essential services.

"All customized development that is taking place on standalone applications might have shifted to open source. Majority of front-end management, word processing, accounts, small databases are still on the Windows platform," says VS Kundu, special secretary & director, Information Technology, Haryana. A senior official from the Maharashtra IT ministry tells DQ, "Initially, some projects were launched on Linux but the support is poor and expensive. Open source is no different from proprietary software. If at all we would go for open source it should come at a better support and minimum cost," says the official.

Dual Standards
The government seems to be still playing it safe. While there is no definite policy regulation in this direction by the government at the center, what has come as a positive push for the open source faction is the fact that the ministry of IT and Communications has affirmed its role as a facilitator for use of open standards in e-Gov projects.

R Chandrashekhar, additional secretary, DIT, ministry of IT and Communication, government of India points out, "The stated policy of the Government on this is to adopt open standards. We want to remain technology neutral, and do not want to regulate use of any one technology."

"We certainly want to adopt open standards as far as our e-Governance projects are concerned," he adds.

The governments attempts to push open standards, however, did reflect not only in the increased adoption of Linux in critical applications by some of the other state governments, but also in the move which saw its technology and research wings, National Informatics Center (NIC) and Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) sprucing up their open source infrastructure.

"Clearly, open source is going to be very crucial when it comes to e-Governance projects. So, it makes lot of sense for us to have a center devoted to building open source applications," says a senior official at NIC. C-DAC too has set up a center totally devoted to open source.

"The government is realizing that to uplift the masses in India, it is essential that India leverages its IT prowess. IT can provide the uplift through better citizen services, improved and easily accessible education, jobs creation, and enhanced ability to export IT services. Open Source software with its favorable economics and community-based development model is ideally suited to address these challenges," says Zia Saquib, executive director, C-DAC, Mumbai.

It is in this scenario that IBM, in partnership with IIT-Mumbai and C-DAC, established the Open Source Software Resource Center (OSSRC), with the aim of developing, adopting and disseminating solutions, education and content that use open standards in support of Indias economic development plans.

Gopakumar Thampi, executive director, Public Affairs Foundation highlights a different perspective here. "Overall, technology choices in all e-Gov or ICT roll-outs in India seem to be a victim of a "unipolar" choice. The need is to actively encourage alternatives."

The Road Ahead
Thampi makes an interesting observation: "A major boost to the advocates of open source software is the growing presence of "technocrats" in the Indian bureaucracy. The large number of engineers who enter the civil service are conversant with the technology choice issues unlike their predecessors a decade back who mainly came from the humanities and had very little hands on knowledge about technological issues and choices."

While the competition is visible in the Left-run states more and Tamil Nadu, so far, what needs to be seen is the pace at which Linux is adopted by other states. And thats where cost and support will become crucial. "Governments are cost sensitive organizations, and therefore future decisions will be made on cost effectiveness," says DC Misra, ex-IT secretary, Delhi Government. "In fact, we would see Microsoft also mould and expand into the Linux framework," adds Misra. Trained manpower on the Linux too is going to be another issue.

The battle between open source and proprietary software will not die down anytime soon. It will continue to simmer. Definitely, the penguin needs to do more. The big question is not whether it can but how t?

Urvashi Kaul
urvashik@cybermedia.co.in

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