Indian eGovernance initiatives

The recent letter send by the National Knowledge Commission to the Prime Minister Dr. Singh, says that India should go the Open Source Software way to effectively implement the eGovernance initiatives. It is very clear that the panel wanted to minimize the cost of implementation and also wanted to have an open standard so that the proprietary software are kept at bay. Though the intentions are correct but it seems that this might not be the best of an idea to implement at this time. Why I am saying this is because Open Source Softwares have various problems in support issues. The education level and the technical comfort of the normal Indian is not unknown to anyone. In these circumstances the ideal solution would be to have solutions from some vendors who then can be held accountable for their systems. But at the same time there is a big problem in this approach also. Which is that once the Government staff bents towards eGovernance then in near future when we would definitely like to go for Open Office Documents it would be very tough to migrate whole systems towards it. Not only the training costs but also the transition costs for the SW would be prohibitively high. The recent Massachusetts incident in which Microsoft Office 12 OpenXML format was rejected by the panel and they went for Open Document Format and PDF gives a clear indication of where the world is heading. Moreover the Open Document Format being based on the OpenOffice.org's XML formats makes the work easier. The Government records needs to be maintained for several decades. The tax transaction records, land dealings and many other critical documents needs to be stored for very long time. By the time they are required in near future the reading application would have gone so many changes that it would be impossible to read it. But then it is also not guaranteed that even if we use Open Office Document format the versions in future would be backward compatible with an application which is 50 years old. It seems that we are getting into the mess of reinventing the wheel and that too for a shorter period. Here is where the pioneering words of legendary Adobe Chairman Dr. John Warnock come into picture that you can never replace the physical paper. The digital paper should try to be a subordinate of the master paper and should not pursuit a quixotic dream of replacing it. We need to reduce our dependence on physical paper but we should be aware that physical paper might exist till the world lasts.