A Billion people and even more phones Keerthana Krishnan India

INDIA The land of the Taj Mahal and the spices, the bright colours and elephants. As anyone who’s ever been there knows, India is a place like no other where we celebrate our unity amongst diversity With over a billion souls divided over lines of language, religion and more, one of the things India finds unity in is it’s love for technology

IMPORTANCE : India is the second largest country by population in the world with approx. 1.2 billion people Considering its closest rivals by population, China with nearly 70% and USA has 90+% technology penetration to the masses In combination with her neighbours Pakistan and Bangladesh, South Asia provides the platform for the next great technology evolution

SOME STATISTICS : 31% had access to basic sanitation (366 million ) according to the UN and WHO There are over 545 million cell phones now connected. While this is obviously very bad from a health perspective, it just shows the potential that India has.

WHAT IF A BILLION PEOPLE JOINED THE INTERNET IN THE NEXT FEW YEARS?

HUMAN RESOURCES : While more developed countries have plateaued out with their connectivity numbers, large parts of India are still left to be digitally connected When this (largely rural) population joins, it would add nearly 600 million plus users to the grid from India alone. This is a powerful incentive for any tech company

WHY SHOULD WE CARE? Economic stability. India has weathered the worst of the recent economic crises and remains one of the few bright spots All the top tech leaders from Tim Cook to Mark Zuckerberg have traveled to India in the past six months to offer support for development India has a great wealth of underutilised technical talent who can be introduced to open source computing

INDIA

A BIT ABOUT KERALA A small state at the south end of India Literally translates to “The land of coconuts”, famously called “God’s own Country” Population of 3.5 crore (~35 million) over an area of about 40,000 km^2 with a density of about 950 per km^2

FOSS @ KERALA : ORIGINS Kerala was the first state in India to formally adopt a pro-FOSS IT policy in 2001 Follow up conferences were held in 2005 and 2008 This led to the creation of ICFOSS in 2009

ICFOSS

IT@SCHOOL

STARTUP VILLAGE

SIGNIFICANCE First administrative body in the world to move to open source entirely for administration The licensing cost of Open Source software is legally nil, resulting in lower total cost of ownership. The complete documentation at Niyamsabha is done in Malayalam, which is a complex text indic script

SPECIFICATIONS 80 operators from eight branches of the Kerala Legislature Secretariat write over 500 pages of text on an average day during the assembly session. Kerala government recently mandated (pdf) all Kerala government departments, institutions and public sector undertakings (PSUs) to migrate to free & open source operating system by June 30th, 2014.

OTHER MILESTONES A new Indic Keyboard was also released by SMC, as part of the ongoing Government of India-supported Android R&D project of ICFOSS. The Kerala State Electricity Board had also moved to FOSS solutions back in 2006 with its implementation of the billing software Oruma It was followed by Saras, an accounting software from which KSEB has savings of Rs 7-8 crore per year since then.

E-GOVERNANCE

REFERENCES http://www.medianama.com/2014/07/223-kerala-legislature-foss/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICFOSS#Origins https://edistrict.kerala.gov.in/

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