Across classrooms, government departments and public undertakings in Kerala, a quiet but radical shift is taking place. Students, teachers and bureaucrats have thrown proprietary software out of the windows and switched to free software. That’s why the global standard bearers of free software and open source, legendary giants such as Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen and Jimmy Wales make it a point to visit this tiny southern state as frequently as they can to cheer and support a movement that they believe will the harbinger of software freedom across the world. For someone like me who has watched in despair the slide of Kerala into an ossified society of closed minds since its communist revolution of the 1950s, this development means that the spirit of change, innovation and modernity is still alive among the people.

Look at what has happened in the last 5-6 years since Kerala began to take its IT agenda seriously. The flagship IT@School project provides ICT-enabled education to 1.6 million students every year in a programme aimed at enhancing the intellectual productivity of teachers and a better understanding of their curriculum by students. It is possible that some states in India would have more impressive statistics on this score. But what is important about this achievement is that it’s based entirely on free software adapted and developed locally.

For those looking for more practical benefits, the Kerala State Electricity (KSEB) could provide the answer. It is here that the more significant innovations have come up after the board switched to free software. Initially, proprietary software was used in some 150-odd sections but now applications based on free software have been rolled out in all 600 sections. The board’s Oruma billing software was created in-house entirely, a rare feat for a non-software company, say industry experts.

Underpinning this shift is a firm rooting in Marxist ideology. The state’s new IT policy —a sea-change from the earlier one which was focused on the IT industry and looked only at the outsourced industry — says categorically that the government sees free software as a unique opportunity to build a truly egalitarian knowledge society. “The new policy’s title itself gives our goal, ‘Towards an Inclusive Knowledge Society’ and we have tried to define what we mean by inclusive and knowledge society in the policy document,” C M Joseph Mathew, IT adviser to Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan, had told me late in December.

It was probably one of the last, if not the very last chats Mathew had with the media on Kerala’s path-breaking policy. Days later he was removed from his post, a victim of the fierce internecine struggle in the Kerala CPM. Some Kerala watchers have hastened to reassure me that Mathew’s removal is unlikely to result in a reversal of policy on free software at least under the CPM regime.

For one, there is the cost advantage. IT@Schools has supplied around 50,000 computers to schools and the proprietary operating systems and other application software, according to the official calculation is estimated at about Rs 10,000 per PC for licensed software. Add to this, the educational content like interactive multimedia CDs and the savings come to Rs 75 lakh. The examination software adds another Rs 25 lakh or so to the kitty, resulting in overall savings of Rs 41 crore. But the jury is still out on the appropriate software, not least because of the high-profile public relations exercise conducted by purveyors of proprietary software. Microsoft, for instance, is into large-scale training of school teachers and is reported to have made nearly a quarter million of them proficient in Windows apart from providing cheaper versions of its OS to schools.

But the prospect of making societies more inclusive through sharing is a concept that is likely to keep Kerala hooked to the idea of free software. Perhaps, it’s something in their genes. Stallman, the persuasive prophet of software, had remarked that Indians more than any other people were attracted to this culture. And coming back from a recent conference in Thiruvananthapuram on ‘Freedom in Computing: Development and Culture’, Eben Moglen, professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, founder-director of the Software Freedom Law Centre, had told me that Kerala had reached a mature and impressive moment in its development of free software.

It has inspired one other state, Andhra Pradesh, to include the use of free software in its IT programme, a trend that could catch on in coming days.

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