When it comes to adoption of open-source technologies in India, Kerala is way ahead of all other states. Kerala has some of the oldest FOSS groups of this country, and they have done a wonderful job migrating (or persuading to migrate) a large part of the state’s IT administration to FOSS technologies. In October last year, the state electricity board of Kerala saved ^[1] a whopping $1.6 billion in IT bills, using Open Source technologies. This time though, Kerala has made a new record in IT savings with over $10 million saved using FOSS in educational institutes.

The state of Kerala has achieved this marvelous feat by using an Open Source school management system called Fedena. The project of migration to Fedena was named Sampoorna ^[2], and it is described as

Sampoorna is the implementation of Fedena by Government of Kerala, India. Details of around 7million students from Standard 1 to 12, in over 15,000 schools in the State, will now be easily accessible to school authorities.

Other states in India have a lot to learn from Kerala. If we extrapolate from this data, we can arrive at a rough estimate of $300 million in savings if all Indian states adopt Open Source technologies, and this is considering only education! Clearly, there is a vast scope for saving IT expenses, and the Indian government should take this matter seriously.