Kerala assembly migrates to free software platform

The Kerala assembly secretariat has moved to a free software platform for its business from Thursday, Speaker G. Karthikeyan said.

On an average day during the assembly session, over 500 pages of text, most of it in Malayalam, are entered by more than 80 operators from the eight branches of legislative secretariat. These are printed and produced in a book form before the end of the working hours.

The assembly makes significant use of computing software for its routine business, marked by large volumes of text, time-bound completion of work and exacting requirements in layout and content.

The legislative secretariat decided to move its workforce to free software platforms in response to the state government policy.

International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS), the autonomous institution under the state government, provided initial training to users and was in charge of the transition which took three months of work to complete.

"Free software migration of the Kerala assembly was a prestigious project for us," said Satish Babu, director, ICFOSS.

"Despite several challenges, both technical, relating to the complexity, volume and speed, as well as human resource-related such as training staff, we were able to implement it on time," Babu added.