Economic Impact of Open Standard Software: An Indian Perspective Prof. Rajanish Dass IIM, Ahmedabad

Impacts  Better options  Cutting out ‘vendor lock-in’  Greater choice among vendor selection  Promise for supporting innovation  Low cost of switching

Economic Advantage  In case of perfect competition, market determines the price  Local innovations can be supported at low cost  Better sustaining capability due to presence of many players

Economic Advantage  Competition will also determine that enhanced products reaches customer in right time and not the other way round  One bold step towards citizen centric policies  Boon for nurturing ICT enabled economy

Global Scenario  Governments across the globe are giving serious considerations  Number of nations across the globe are planning for adapting to ODF  A number of other governments have started providing active support to usage by encouraging end-users

Tangible Economic Benefits : India  Adoption of ODF & Open Office by Govt. of NCT Delhi  Adoption of ODF & Open Office by the Election Commission of India

Gov. of NCT Delhi  Usage of IT across departments was going up  In 2004 total IT related procurement against 52 orders was Rs Lakhs  In 2005 total IT related procurement against 117 orders was Rs. 352 Lakhs  Approx 379% increase in IT procurement

Cost Implications  78% of the total software purchase was for buying licensed Office suites

Circular by IT Secretary  On 30-Nov-05 Secretary (IT), Delhi issued a circular to encourage use of OpenOffice  Prohibited purchase of licensed Office suite across all departments, even on demand  Acted as the enabler for managing this change by asking clarifications to be directed to DoIT  Main reason for taking this decision was cost-cutting

Other Initiatives  State Judiciary systems are based on Open Standards up to district level courts  HMIS for 31 hospitals to use Open Standards  Super speciality hospital Institute of Liver and Biliary Services (with a budget of Rs. 3.5 billion) will use Open Standards

Savings for HMIS for Hospitals Type of Hospital No. of Nodes Extra Financial Implication for Windows per node No. of Hospitals Total Amount Saved (INR) A200700, B C TOTAL SAVINGS (34.3 million)

Savings from Licensing Fees

Total Savings  Total Savings: Savings from using Linux: Rs. 3.5 Cr Savings from Licensing fees: Rs. 24 Cr Total Savings: Rs 28 Cr (Approx) Add to this the cost of a lower downtime + freedom from vendor lock-in and enabling migration+ future upgrades

Election Commission of India  Spread across the national geography of India  Has adopted Open Source and Open Office  Has also opened up its in-house databases and software developed  Train the trainer approach in August 2006 followed by a circular  Distributed across India 4120 CDs containing ODF, Open Source Software and Freewares

Election Commission of India  Number of Computers to be impacted when Open software gets accepted in all nodes of EC : at least 10,000 – 12,000  Ballpark Savings (in tune with previous slide of NCT Delhi): Rs. 280 – 336 Cr.  But both of the departments are facing challenges in execution of these decisions

Challenges  Lack of trained manpower  Lack of support for training  Cost of Training and Support  Less awareness among end-users  Inertia to change  Bottlenecks in ensuring and monitoring change

Road Ahead  Promoters must remove the elitist tag from Open Source and ODF  Walk an extra mile for non-technical end-users  Create User groups and enable them to spread the light  …And its all about opening up…having an open mind and an open view

Thanks!