Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan are in the process of procuring over eight million laptops preloaded with proprietary software in clear violation of India's national policy on information and communication technology and incurring avoidable expenditure of large sums of money, activists said.
"It is a 2G kind of situation," said Gurumurthy Kasinathan, director at Bangalore-based IT for Change which campaigns for effective and innovative use of technology in governance.
"The government is spending public funds on expensive software because vendors are influencing the procurement decision." The purchase by the states is for free distribution to students in government schools to fulfil promises made during elections which brought the AIADMK to power in Tamil Nadu and the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh.
The procurement volume is unprecedented and is large enough to significantly expand India's PC market size. Tamil Nadu intends to procure 6.8 million laptops spending Rs 10,200 crore, while the UP government is looking to buy about 1.7 million spending about Rs 2,800 crore - by far the largest government procurements till date.
Rajasthan is looking to buy 1.1 lakh laptops. The tender documents for these purchases specify laptops preloaded with operating system from Microsoft, word processing software from Adobe and security software from Norton or McAfee. Microsoft declined to comment while IT secretaries responsible for the decisions in Rajasthan, UP and Tamil Nadu were not available for comment.
"The decision to choose proprietary software over open source is a clear violation of the National Policy on ICT in Education," said Vinod Raina, member of India's Central Advisory Board of Education that designed the ICT policy in education.
"Financially too, the use of open source makes a huge difference as proprietary software is priced enormously higher than open-source applications". India is one of the fastest growing PC markets in the world, where 11 million PC units were sold in 2012, according to the latest data from market research firm IDC.
Over the next few years, analysts expect the total number of PCs in India to double, aided by largescale government purchases and increased internet access in rural markets. Microsoft, whose India revenues stood at a little over $1 billion (Rs 5,400 crore) in 2012 financial year, gets close to 15-20 % of it from government businesses, says Sumanta Mukherjee, analyst, CyberMedia Research.
"Adobe Acrobat Writer 1 costs around Rs 12,000, the basic Windows operating system Rs 4,000 and Microsoft Office around Rs 10,000. Even if the vendor provides these at highly-discounted prices, it would cost nothing less than Rs 50 crore for the 1,12,000 laptops," wrote IT for Change in its submission to Rajasthan's IT secretary and education minister, proposing the use of free open-source software.
Amman Madan, who teaches sociology of education at the Azim Premji University, attributed the government decision to choose Microsoft and Adobe applications over open source due to their absolute market dominance. Madan, who has previously taught at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, said these decisions usually involve a mix of unfair financial practices as well as lack of awareness on the advantages of open source systems.
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