Excerpts from Section 3.12 of the Assam Government's state IT Policy says:
(a) The Government would promote use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in all the departments and State agencies, bodies and authorities.
(b) The State Government would promote manpower development and training in use of FOSS, especially in day to day office works.
(c) The State Government would promote imparting training on FOSS in schools and colleges.
(d)Entrepreneurs/ companies using FOSS for application/website development would be given preference over those using third party packaged applications.
(e)All source codes customized/developed for any State Government body shall be duly archived in a repository, and shall be made available freely to other Government departments.
(f) The Government departments and bodies would ensure that Open Document Format (ODF) is adhered to in creating and storing editable documents, data and information and all applications developed by the respective departments adhere to ODF and other Open Standards and are largely independent of Operating Systems (OS) and web browsers.
(g)The Government departments and bodies would ensure that any generic hardware procured has support for multiple Operating Systems(OS) such as Unix, Linux, Opensolaris and other open source platforms.
The policy mandates open standards and ODF, in particular, which has been advocated open source supporters the open standard for office documents (instead of proprietary .doc, OOXML and other data formats). It also extends beyond software and says that all generic hardware purchased by the government should have support for open source software. The section mandating that source code developed for any State Government body shall be duly archived in a repository, indicates that the policy makers also understand the power of the open source development model.
The entire document is available here:
http://assamgovt.nic.in/pdf/ITPOLICY-2009-Final-Gazette-Style.pdf
The National Knowledge Commission presented its recommendations on e-Governance to the Minister for Communication and Information Technology. Issues addressed include Open Source Software, Common standards, Web-based Services and National Infrastructure.The commission emphasised on the need for vendor neutrality and transparency in the governments by offering localised data.This makes it clear that the National Knowledge Commission has understood e-Governance in the light of administrative reforms than merely about electronics and information technology infrastructure.
Department of Information technology ,Government of India in the context of preparing the Eleventh Five year plan (2007-2012), has constituted a working group on Information Technology Sector. This groups primary focus is to help formulate the plan for communications and Information Sector. Section 4.9 of this plan highlights the need for Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) in India.
The National Policy on open standards for e-Governance put forward by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, Government of India comes with a set of guidelines for the uniform and reliable implementation of e-Governance solutions. The objective of this policy is to ensure open standards for e-Governance by adopting appropriate Information Technology that best suits the governments agenda to promote its interests.