Earlier this year, National Policy on Software Products was rolled out to create a robust, participatory framework to bring together industry, government and academia on a common platform to make India as a global hub for software products development. This is a much-needed initiative to provide holistic and end-to-end support to the Indian software product ecosystem. The registry is the first step among many towards solving the real problems of the industry and nurturing the software product companies. If done right, this initiative will have immense potential and far-reaching impact to benefit the industry.
Under this policy, one of the key initiatives is the set-up of the Indian Software Product Registry (ISPR) through industry ownership. It is a collaborative platform which will act as national coordination, facilitation and inter-connected centre for all activities related to the Indian software product ecosystem.
The main purpose of this policy is to focus towards the promotion of Indian software products which are defined as under for implementation:
- Indian Company: As per sub-section 26 of section 2 of the Income Tax Act, 1961, “Indian company” means a company formed and registered under the Companies Act, 1956 or Companies Act, 2013, provided that the registered office or, as the case may be, principal office of the company, corporation, institution, association or body in all cases is in India.
- Indian Software Product Company (ISPC): An ISPC is defined as an Indian company in which 51% or more shareholding is with Indian citizen or person of Indian origin and is engaged in the development, commercialisation, licensing and sale /service of software products and has IP rights over the software product(s).
ISPR aims to create a platform to enable discovery of Indian Software Product Companies and their products while simultaneously giving automatic access to the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) platform. This will enable the government to identify Indian companies as part of their buying process. However, more work on specific allocation of government buying and redeveloping of RFP’s in government for products will also be initiated so that the government can finally buy Indian products.
Secondly, by listing on exchange on ISPR will enable MEITY to get a better understanding of the industry so that specific product-related interventions like recurring payments for SaaS companies, credits for R&D to enable Indian companies to invest in research and development, and facilitation of Indian software product industry for providing fiscal incentives, if any, at a later stage among others will also be achieved.
Thirdly, ISPR will also enable Indian Software Product Companies to list their products here and connect to buyers across the world. Since this is a government-backed platform, it provides a high level of trust and authenticity in the global market.
Indian Software Product Companies can register here. For any more queries, please feel to reach out on [email protected].