9- The Practice of Digital India - Policy Foundations

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Digital India - Policy Foundations

The India Government has taken several policy initiatives in the e-Governance domain that are crucial for achieving the vision and objectives of the Digital India programme. Effective implementation of e-Governance is a key component of the out the road-map for implementation of e-Governance projects in the Digital India programme. These policy initiatives are an endeavor to chart out the road-map the implementation of Digital India project in the country. They cover a number of important areas


  • “The e-Kranti Framework” policy provides the eKranti framework that is an integral part of the Digital India programme. With the vision of “Transforming e-Governance for Transforming Governance”, e-Kranti programme aims towards easy governance, effective governance, good governance and mobile governance. It provides the key principles for revamping the existing projects and also for new and ongoing e-Governance projects.
  • The “Policy on Adoption of Open Source Software for Government of India” encourages the formal adoption and use of Open Source Software (OSS) in Government organizations. The compliance to this policy will ensure that strategic control of e-Governance assets would remain with the Government and would also ensure business continuity for the projects in future from technical perspective.
  • The “Framework for Adoption of Open Source Software in eGovernance Systems” suggests a set of recommendations and procedures for promoting, managing and enhancing the adoption of OSS in e-Governance Systems in India. It highlights the impact of adoption of OSS in Government, influencing factors, mutual impact of Open Standards and OSS, establishing enterprise security with OSS, unified software development for all major devices using standards based web browser and use of localisation. The Framework suggests neutral guidelines to select software and the process for induction of OSS solution. The ecosystem suggested to promote the adoption of OSS describes required institutional mechanism, collaboration with key stakeholders like industry, OSS communities, academia, collaborative mechanism, offering of services based on OSS, provisioning of support services on OSS and integration with on-going initiatives.
  • The “Policy on Open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for Government of India” sets out the Government’s approach on the use of “Open APIs” to promote software interoperability for all eGovernance applications & systems and provide access to data & services for promoting participation of all stakeholders including citizens. This policy initiative will encourage the formal use of Open APIs in Government organizations. The world-wide initiatives on “Open Government” also focus on open APIs to easily access the information collected by Government organizations.
  • The “E-mail Policy of Government of India” lays down the guidelines with respect to use of e-mail services by the Government departments and organizations. The policy initiative aims to ensure secure access and usage of Government of India e-mail services by its users and is applicable to all employees of Government of India (GoI) and employees of those State/UT Governments that use the e-mail services of GoI.
  • The “Policy on Use of IT Resources of Government of India” provides the guidelines to ensure proper access to and usage of Government’s IT resources and prevent their misuse by the users. The policy initiative covers all IT resources including desktop devices, portable and mobile devices, networks including wireless networks, Internet connectivity, external storage devices and peripherals like printers and scanners and the software associated therewith.
  • The “Policy on Collaborative Application Development by Opening the Source Code of Government Applications” intends to increase the pace of e-Governance application development and rapid roll out/implementation by adopting an open-source based development model. The Government of India wants to promote re-use of existing developed applications. By opening the source code, the Government wants successful, scalable, high quality e-governance applications to be developed in a collaborative manner. It also wants new applications to be developed to encourage creativity both inside and outside the Government by encouraging collaborative development between Government departments/agencies and private organizations, citizens and developers to create innovative e-Governance applications and solutions.
  • The “Application Development & Re-Engineering Guidelines for Cloud Ready Applications” aims to address one of the major concerns in the e-Governance domain that is lack of process re-engineering and leveraging of the latest emerging technology i.e. Cloud. This guideline intends to ensure development of Common Application Software (CAS) which can be configured as per different States / departments requirements without the need of modifying the core code of the application for a faster deployment so that time, effort and cost in developing applications are saved and to avoid duplication of efforts. It is therefore imperative that applications are developed in conformity to guidelines that makes them standardized and compatible for hosting and running across states.