The government may favour multiple standards for e-governance projects from the earlier stand of supporting single standard for such projects
Govt seen favouring multiple standards to obviate unnecessary lock-in of technology
NEW DELHI: The government may favour multiple standards for e-governance projects from the earlier stand of supporting single standard for such projects, but the deliberations inside the information technology department are still on with final judgment months away.
The draft policy on open standards, which was open to public review till November 26, attracted many comments on why to choose multiple standards over single one as that would create an unnecessary lock-in of the technology and force citizens to use a single format for all government-related efforts like land records, public records and database etc.
Broadly, single standard is supported by the open document format (ODF) brigade like IBM, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems in India, while multiple standards are supported by technology major Microsoft and TCS, Infosys, and trade body Nasscom etc.
Implementation of single standard would be beneficial to ODF supporters and would make companies like TCS, Infosys etc, which are bidding for e-governance projects forced to support the standard and format, whereas multiple standards would not create any barriers for entry of any player.
“I know many people had issues with that, we are discussing it… many questions were asked on that, I can not comment on that whether there is going to be multiple or single standard right now, let the results come,” Jainder Singh, secretary, ministry of information technology told DNA Money.
However, another source from the government said the mood to support multiple standards inside the IT department is getting relaxed against their earlier stand.
“Do not be surprised if you see multiple standards in the future,” the source said on condition of anonymity.
“For each domain, among the Standards meeting the above criteria, government will choose a single standard for a specific purpose within a domain for seamless interoperability and data preservation,” the department of IT said in its draft policy.
But there are issues with using multiple standards as well, as that would create interoperability bottlenecks among the different standards, which is still not completely smooth with accuracy at 99%.
Recently, Microsoft and ODF-supporter Novell announced an investment to build a “bridge between open source and proprietary software to deliver interoperability for organisations operating mixed-source IT environments”. “The whole validation and adoption of the final policy would be out in three months,” a ministry official said last month.
ODF is a file format for electronic office documents such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations.
vivek_s@dnaindia.net
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