Bharat Exhibitions is pleased to organize the 4th Edition of Open Source Virtual Summit 2021 on 24th February at 1030 - 1300 Hrs IST. The Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) has already said that open source adoption was necessary to support the government’s goal to transform India into a “Digitally Empowered Society and a Knowledge Economy”. It has added that the country had always advocated the use of open standards and open source technologies in the public sector. The Indian government spends significant amount of money per year on software licences and maintenance. The Government is adopting this technology as it offers a scalable and robust platform which in turn provides the best possible outcome. Moreover, the most important reason behind its swift adoption is freedom of choice. India launched Aarogya Setu mobile App for helping augment the efforts of limiting the spread of COVID19, with an objective of enabling Bluetooth based contact tracing, mapping of likely hotspots and dissemination of relevant information about COVID19. Aarogya Setu have been transparency, privacy and security and in line with India’s policy on Open Source Software, the source code of Aarogya Setu has now been made open source.

The Government of India has encouraged the adoption of this technology in the Digital India initiative and this has further encouraged the CIOs of enterprises and other government organizations to make a move towards Open Source technology. The rise of digital transformation in India has pushed the adoption of Open Source both by enterprises and government. According to a research, the Open Source Services market will be worth more than $30 billion by 2022. Open Source platform offers cost efficiency, scalability, innovation, rapid deployment, security and much more so it is the first choice for Government of India to leverage the digital transformation initiative which is presently going on in the country.

The primary goal of employing open source in government is also to facilitate the transfer of data as smoothly as possible. Open-standards proponents say that this approach would lead to more innovation within government and better citizen services. The forum analysed the success stories that have been achieved and what are the real challenges that might be slowing down the growth.