Tech Repository For Digital Services

Subject – Science and Tech

Context – MeitY plans tech repository for digital services using open source software.

Concept –

Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s (MeitY) is looking to find customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions based on Free and open-source software (FOSS) that it could deploy on its own platforms and use it in the future to develop other citizen-facing interfaces similar to an Aarogya Setu app or a COWIN platform.
The goal is to create an open-source software repository that could be accessed and used across departments, States and countries. At present, the government is working on using FOSS to find solutions in agritech, healthcare, governance and education segments.
Towards this, MeitY had announced #FOSS4Gov Innovation Challenge for which it has received 1,400 registrations across the country including tier-II and tier-III cities.
The winning teams will not only work with the government on its various population-scale platforms but also get cash prizes of up to ₹90 lakh to develop their solution.
Three winners will be selected in CRM and ERP categories separately. The first prize will be ₹20 lakh, the second prize of ₹15 lakh and the third prize will be ₹10 lakh.
MeitY is partnering with investment firm Omidyar Network India (ONI) to mentor the shortlisted teams for the programme. ONI will also be separately awarding a special prize to the team developing and integrating citizen-centric safeguard in their apps which will protect citizen’s data.

Free and open-source software (FOSS)

Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software that is both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source code is openly shared so that people are encouraged to voluntarily improve the design of the software.
This is in contrast to proprietary software, where the software is under restrictive copyright licensing and the source code is usually hidden from the users.

Why FOSS?

While the government is known to work with legacy IT majors to build its various platforms deploying their proprietary software, the trend is slowly shifting.
Since 2016, the government is using FOSS to develop several digital services including DigiLocker, AarogyaSetu, UPI, Aadhaar to name a few.
In FOSS, there’s always a community of developers who are willing to engage with you and help you. The overall cost of ownership is also lower for the government. And when it is available for replication, others don’t have to build the solution from scratch.
In addition to cost and vendor lock-in issues, FOSS enable greater accountability and transparency. Apps like AarogyaSetu and COWIN were built on FOSS, and when the code was shared with the broader community, a number of people came back reporting bugs and other issues, which the government incorporated. It increases engagement with the community.