Following up on an earlier blog posting, Indian Open Standards Policy Finalized, I read an article published in the The Hindu, one of India's leading newspapers, about the concrete benefits of this policy. It also provides a very meaningful template for open source advocates to see how well an argument can be made with the proper framing of facts. Here is a quote from the third paragraph:

SCOSTA [the Smart Card Operating System for Transport Applications] was a standard developed for smart card-based driving licences and transport-related documentation by different State governments. It was developed by the National Informatics Centre in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. Despite attempts by proprietary lobbies to make the body opt for a proprietary standard, the NIC and academics went ahead and developed an open standards, one that comprised technological specifications that were entirely royalty-free, and put up the specifications on their website. By doing so, they made a huge impact on the entire market.

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Venkatesh Hariharan reports:

After three years of continuous running battles, India's Department of Information Technology has finalized the national policy on Open Standards. Over the last three years, we worked with our friends in government, academic, civil society and the media to push the Indian government in favor of a policy that mandates a single, royalty-free standard. With this, India becomes another major country to join the growing open standards movement.

India's e-governance standards portal is at http://egovstandards.gov.in/ and this is the link from which you can directly read the policy document.

Of particular interest is Clause 4.1.2:

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The Center for Strategic & International Studies updated their latest survey of Government Open Source Policies for 2010, and it is again an outstanding report. From the introductory note:

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