After three years of continuous running battles, India's Department of Information Technology has finalized the national policy on Open Standards.

With this announcement, India has become another major country to join the growing open standards movement. Some of the largest greenfield e-government projects in the world are in India and the government aims to take e-gov services to most of India's billion plus population.

Open source poster boy, Red Hat believes that this is a historic moment for the Indian IT industry and DIT deserves congratulations for approving a policy that will ensure India's Digital Sovereignty and the long-term preservation of India's e-government data.

Most importantly, a key section of the policy, Section 4.1.2 unambiguously states that, “The patent claims necessary to implement the identified standard shall be made available on a royalty-free basis for the life time of the standard.” This was the section that was hotly contested by proprietary software vendors who locked in users through closed, proprietary formats.

The current situation in India, where different e-government applications use a multiplicity of standards mirrors the situation in 18th century France which used 250,000 different units of weights and measures before the metric system was mandated by government, bringing a unified system of weights and measures into force.

Under the National e-Government Action Plan, the Indian government is spending billions of dollars on creating e-government applications. Open Standards are the backbone that will unify these applications and enable the sharing of data across different applications. Red Hat claims that this announcement will drive more efficiency in e-governance enabling policy makers and e-government practitioners to quickly pull together data from different government departments and take more informed decisions.