NEW DELHI | BENGALURU: Indian government software applications are set to make the shift to open source, potentially boosting the pace at which such programmes are developed, and leading 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.“We don’t want to make it a question of ideology but wherever possible, we want to make use of open source,” RS Sharma, secretary, department of electronics and information technology, told ET. “We are also preparing something like a SourceForge, where we will open up the source code of all the existing software and crowd source development like on Github,” he said.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 egovernance and add up significant savings as code and applications can be reused. Governments in India are expected to spend $6.4 billion on IT products and services in 2014, according to Gartner. “The advantage is that every consulting firm will not have to re-invent the software,” said Sharma. 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’, accessed by ET, 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 of 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 Pullur said, “Given the diversity and plurality of the nation, open source adoption is the best approach and rightly chosen by the government.” Singh added that India has had a policy for open standards, which was drafted in 2010, but its implementation was “very shabby”. He hoped that the new policy had the “highest political backing”. Another advantage would be scaling up skill development in open source.