Free software can save ₹8,000 cr from schools alone, says study

Implementation of free software across 3.2 lakh schools in the country could lead to savings of more than ₹8,000 crore, according to an impact study.

Rahul De, Hewlet Packard Chair Professor, IIM-Bangalore, made this projection while quoting preliminary results from his study on ‘Free software in government departments’.

He was speaking at the fifth international free software conference, Swatantra 2014,’ that got under way here on Friday. Earlier, free software guru Richard Stallman inaugurated the event.

De said that approximately ₹18 lakh is being spent per school under the Centre’s ‘ICT in Education’ scheme. This could be reduced by over 15 per cent by just using free software.

There is no pedagogic or academic reason why proprietary software should be preferred when free software could meet all requirements, De said.

He cited its adoption has led to re-thinking on entire chain of bringing IT to schools. The study found that except for Kerala, most states are using proprietary software for schools.

“Implementing free software in all departments of the government can bring tangible and intangible benefits.”

Separately, he launched the Varnam predictive input system developed by the Swatantra Malayalam Computing as part of the Google Summer of Code project.

Varnam is a FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) predictive text input method as a replacement to Google Indian language Input.

IT currently supports nine languages and Kerala Secretariat is expected to implement it shortly.

The three-day Swatantra 2014 is being organised by the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software based here.

Co-organisers include Free Software Foundation India; Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru; Software Freedom Law Centre, Delhi; Swatantra Malayalam Computing; FOSSEE, IIT-Bombay; Spoken Tutorials, IIT-Bombay; SPACE Kerala; Department of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Kerala University; and IEEE Kerala Section.