I am surprised not to find a single Indian govt software being open sourced. This is despite the fact that most of them have horrible user experience and highly buggy. In all probability the code behind it would be equally poor.
The govt. continues to spend crores of tax payers money to IT service providers to develop these abysmal portals instead of open sourcing it.
Examples of some portals that I used personally:
- Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) complaint portal
- LIC portal
- IRCTC ticketing portal
- RTI portal
- MSEB bill payment
- I wont be surprised if this is true for most govt. sites/apps.
Each of them to say the least have poor user experience and worse is highly buggy. E.g., I logged a complaint in the PMC portal and got an email with ticket ID. To my surprise when I logged back in the portal after a week, there were 0 open, pending or closed tickets in my account!
Why open source?
First of all its built using tax payers’ money. Why should be is hidden property unless there is some trade secret involved in it?
Secondly, why would every state, municipal and even country“reinvent the wheel”? E.g. if Pune builds a complaint management system, why should Pimpri Chinchwad have to build another one for itself? If Maharastra builds a software for vehicle management (RTO office) why should rest of the states build another? And just a different state, even someone in Sri Lanka or Nairobi can reuse it.
Thirdly, India has the highest number of programmers in the world. Most of them are bored or frustrated in their day job, and looking for an exciting side project to work on. They would be more than willing to contribute for free to such projects. Its not only exciting but also a sense of society contribution involved. Similarly students doing college projects are another source of free hours that can be utilized. As in any open source project, you need strong gate-keeping to ensure quality of code contributed is high. Its is very easily doable as is done in 1000s of open source projects across the globe.
Fourth, if and when, for whatever reason govt has to change the vendor who is in-charge of developing the portal, it will be very easy to make the transition since the code is publicly available. Govt wont be at the mercy of a single vendor for life.
Overall, “open source” is an important aspect of “open government” after “open data”. Its a no-brainier that all government projects have to be open source unless confidential information of national or trade secret is involved. Especially in the context of smart-city and digital India, this will be critical since government spend on IT is expected to go up exponentially.
Unfortunately, no one has come forward to do it. The only reason could be vested interests of the IT services companies i.e. cartel between decision makers and software companies. Naturally open sourcing is not great for them since it will mean lesser projects and worse their “code quality” will be exposed to the whole world.
Hopefully we will see this change in the near future. Being an open source product developer myself, I will be happy to help any organization in learning more and moving towards open sourcing their projects — for free of cost.
PS: We are developers of OpenSpecimen — an free and open source software for clinical research centers.
Guest Post by Srikanth Adiga, OpenSpecimen