Software pricing schemes simply have no place in e-government initiatives, according to Harbaksh Singh, commissioner of electronics and information technology for the north Indian state of Haryana, where the population exceeds 21 million people.

One of the primary goals of e-government is to cut costs, while providing high-quality services to citizens, Singh pointed out after the Haryana government announced it had signed an agreement with Sun Microsystems to use Sun's open standards-based productivity package, StarOffice 7 Office Suite, across all state government departments.

According to Singh, who criticized Microsoft's software licensing policies in the Indian press, Haryana's goal is to migrate to StarOffice software the 8,000 PCs in its government office that currently run Microsoft Office 98 and 2000. Singh believes the switch should result in savings of more than $2 million.

Those savings will be used to increase social services in Haryana. The government will allocate a portion of the funds to upgrading current technology and providing some of those services via Haryana's e-government portal, a point of contact for the region's growing IT business service offerings and government-to-government initiatives. Until recently, the region's primary economy was agricultural, but it has seen a shift toward manufacturing and IT services—Haryana is now the third-highest outsourcing supplier in India.

"The adoption of StarOffice 7 in Haryana will enable the government to bring down costs and divert these funds to other more pressing social concerns," says Singh. "That is what e-government and all government is meant to do: improve the lives of citizens."

Read the full article at http://www.sun.com/br/0404_ezine/gov_india.html