Policy on open standards for e-governance released

India's Department of IT (DIT) recently finalized its policy on open standards for e-Governance. A write-up about a draft version of the policy and related discussion can be read here.  The final version of the policy adopts a single and Royalty-Free (RF) Open Standard.  The standard can be retrieved from: http://egovstandards.gov.in/ 

In our discussion of the draft policy, we had focussed on two key provisions of the draft policy as being of interest to patent practitioners-(i) whether the standard would be made available on a royalty free basis or whether or a RF-RAND basis and (ii) whether the standard would recursively open.  We had also remarked about the fact that the draft policy did not refer clearly to the necessary claims and the corresponding ambiguity in the disclosure requirements.  


The finalized version of the policy now includes the statement about necessary claims, and further clarifies the term recusively open.  Therefore part of the ambiguity in the draft version is removed.  The corresponding clause now states, "The Patent claims necessary to implement the Identified Standard shall be made available on a Royalty-Free basis for the life time of the Standard."  Additionally, the phrase "Identified Standard shall be recursively open as far as possible" has also been included as a mandatory characteristics of the policy.  
The policy now defines 'Recursively open' as: "The mandatory characteristics are applicable recursively to the normative references of the Identified Standard i.e. standards which are essential for the implementation of the Standard of a particular version of the Standard."
This policy represents a historical milestone for India- for example, it is under this policy that the Indian government is seeking to spend more than 10 billion dollars on e-governance. For example, the world largest unique-identification program is in India.  Hopefully, the standard would be widely adopted and become a model for other countries e-governance programs.


Image taken from: http://www.opensource.org/