"The govt should not get into technology battle"

Microsoft India Group Director (Public Sector) Karan Bajwa talks about how he plans to expand the company's share of government sector business in India

Published on 03/30/2009 - 15:45:51 PM

Microsoft India Group Director (Public Sector) Karan Bajwa has scripted many a success stories during his two decade innings in the industry. He has also served Cisco India as Public Sector head. In an interview with Pravin Prashant, this former President of Tulip IT Services talks about how he plans to expand the Microsoft's share of government sector business in India, as also the status of the company's various education initiatives. Excerpt:

It has been over 15 months since you joined Microsoft. How has your journey of handling government business in one of the world's biggest democracy been so far?
In terms of quantitative measure, the business is growing at a triple digit rate. The whole engagement with the government is peaking up and Microsoft is focusing on its solutions approach. We have reoriented our team and public sector division is focusing on government and defence. The division is also focusing on the education and healthcare vertical. This includes both private and public organisations.

What about the government business or e-Governance business in particular?
Within the government sector, our focus has clearly been around the National e-Gov Plan (NeGP) and the policy of automating different government departments with the objective of streamlining the processes. The whole engagement with the government is about creating an initial model and then replicating it on a larger scale.

The government healthcare department is at an early adoption stage. Initially, the government's focus is to provide basic healthcare. So in the first phase, building government management information system (MIS) related to training, human resources and inventory is our priority.

In the second phase, the focus would be on health information system (HIS). Here, private hospitals have an edge in IT deployment over government hospitals.

In defence, the focus is on digitisation of processes such as back end processing, procurement, inventory management, tactical communication system, battlefield management system, and others. And this is applicable for all—Army, Navy and Air Force.

On the education front, we are creating an education ecosystem by lowering the barrier on IT education. The barrier is not in the government's ability to shift hardware and software but to train hundreds of teachers and students with IT education.

Where does project Siksha —aimed at accelerating IT literacy amongst government school teachers and students launched in 2003 by Microsoft—stand now? Have you set any targets for 2009?
Project Shiksha had a target of 80,000 teachers in four years and we have achieved 260,000 in four years. After seeing the success, we have scaled up our targets and we plan to train 100,000 teachers every year for the next five years.

What are your other plans in education sector?
Microsoft IT academies have been set-up in 10 states—Maharashtra, Uttaranchal, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh. We will continue with these states and continue with others for possible areas of cooperation.

We are building proof of concept, successfully implementing it and then handing it over to the government for large scale training. Besides, there are initiatives aimed at motivating teachers through Innovative Teacher Leadership Award, enabling them to go back to school and build curriculum. Overall we have a database of 16,000 case studies which has been published on indiashiksha.com portal.

Microsoft is also partnering with state governments and the Ministry of HRD for designing IT curriculum for class six till 10th to ensure that schools adopt right curriculum. Besides, the company is involved in identifying economic reasons for dropouts in schools and creating better areas of employment through digital literacy curriculum.

We are providing basic IT education free of cost to schools, colleges and CSC. We are providing self paced training course to rural students which offer examination and certificate from Microsoft and the concerned state government thereby increasing the chance of employability.

What is the focus area for your division in 2009?
The focus areas for us in 2009 are clearly governance, education and defence.

In terms of localisation of software, what is the status of project Bhasha in the country? Can we expect Microsoft to offer solution in all 22 scheduled languages in India anytime soon?
We plan to support as many as possible languages as possible because there is definitely a need for localisation of software across the world. Presently, we support 14 Indian languages. With government mandating official medium of instruction there has been an increase in the uptake of local language computing.

Project Saksham addresses the key challenges of affordability, accessibility and relevance to provide a sustainable rural kiosk business model. How are things progressing on this front?
We partnered with the government for the adoption of CSC’s business model. The subsidy for CSC is not good enough so the operator is focusing on digital literacy curriculum to villagers by lowering the barrier in terms of affordability and sustainability.

The CSC was conceived way back for offering government program and government services but it will not succeed as there is no availability of government services. Mission Mode Projects will start once the portal is in place. The CSC is not going to sustain if you are restricting their services.

Microsoft has launched a single integrated application SWARAJ for managing the information needs for all the five tiers of Panchayati Raj in India. Where has the platform been deployed till date?
In the 73rd Amendment of Panchayati Raj, the focus is on 14-15 functions. We have created an application framework and have lowered the entry barrier. Himachal Pradesh has rolled out Panchayati Raj and we are talking to other states for SWARAJ deployment. With the overall acceptance of the model we are expecting 5-6 states will adopt this platform.

Do you see an impact of economic downturn on government and public sector IT spending?
The government focus is to stimulate and continue to invest in the market by infusing lot of funds. For example, the government is enforcing NeGP. The Project Arrow is in its next phase. The 11th Five Year Plan is aimed at education and healthcare. Even for the new government, I don’ think priority from education, healthcare and IT for governance is going to go away.

While the off take of central and state government MMPs have been relatively slow, do you expect a faster deployment of Microsoft's My Neighbourhood Map (MNM) services by governments in the country?
In MMPs, the single mantra is replicate and recreate. The possible workflows can be different but baseline requirement does not change in it. So the focus is on creating baseline and doing customisation. MMPs have not been picking up since there is a delay in SWAN implementation.

MNM is a powerful tool and is an enterprise class tool for defence and GIS mapping information. We have done some demos in the Indian market.

With some state governments joining the Linux bandwagon, and others already thinking about open source regime, what does Microsoft plan to do to check this shift?
Let's not get into the battle but focus on relevance. The focus should be on usage, training and skill. In 9/10, the commercial software has ease of use, availability of skill sets and employability in the commercial world. These factors are all relevant for students, teachers and schools.

Anything free is not sustainable and there is something behind which will hit you and one cannot get out of the pitfall. We are clarifying the perception that open source is not free.

So what do you expect the government to do?
The government should not get into technology battle but government should focus on how to deploy, deliver, support and sustain government automations across departments and across states. The focus should be on how states are going to replicate rather than recreate different processes.

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Submitted by Gurumurthy Kasinathan on 04/06/2009 - 14:13:19 PM.

There are several contestable statements in Mr Bajwa's interview, I will just pick a couple here.
His statement that "Anything free is not sustainable and there is something behind which will hit you and one cannot get out of the pitfall" has been contradicted by Microsoft on the same day! See news item that Microsoft has decided to discontinue its Encarta (encyclopaedia) product. See: http://www.deccanherald.com/Content/Apr12009/cyberspace20090331127359.asp.
This is because it could not compete or measure up against Wikipedia which is based on the collaborative and free sharing principles like free software is. So his own company has accepted the superiority of the free and collaborative models that are very possible in the digital world, over proprietary models. The same realisation is yet to hit them in the case of MS Windows and MS Office, but the growing popularity of Ubuntu GNU/Linux operating system and Open Office to name couple of free software applications is a writing on the wall.
Basically the simple question to our Indian Governments is: Should we purchase proprietary software on a 'pay per user' model when comparable free software alternatives are available and are already being used by millions all over the world? Why should a poor country enrich the richest company in the world and get locked into their proprietary model, when instead the Government can adopt free software and support large number of small enterprises and the community of free software developers across the country and the world?
In India, Kerala is already successfully doing this and saving hundreds of crores of scarce public funds. The freedom to share the software is essential for the equitable spread of the IT revolution in India.
Thus it is not a 'technology battle between proprietary model and free software' as Mr Bajwa claims. Rather the commercial interests of Microsoft and that of the Government and Indian society in this case are in conflict and hopefully Governments will decide in favor of the Public interest and adopt and promote free software. No wonder the election documents of both the left (CPM) and right (BJP) endorse free software as being in the public interest. (see www.Public-Software.in for these manifestos and also for other reasons why FOSS should be adopted).
Specially in the case of education, Microsoft Academies prohibit the teaching of Free Software applications which is against basic pedagogical principles and enslaves Indian students to single software platform whereas free software is far superior since the learner has the freedom to study,modify and distribute the software. Hence education departments should clearly reject proprietary software and give their students meaningful learning options
Guru www.Public-Software.in www.ITforChange.net

Submitted by QuestionIPR on 04/03/2009 - 02:46:54 AM.

"The focus should be on usage, training and skill. In 9/10, the commercial software has ease of use, availability of skill sets and employability in the commercial world. These factors are all relevant for students, teachers and schools." Mr Bajwa clearly comes from a world which pays no attention to the developments in other parts but has blinkers around him so as to blindly focus on increasing the profits for his monopoly company without bothering about the future of either the country or the IT industry. A few examples of the acknowledgment by the world of the importance and advantages will show how Mr Bajwa's thinking is a chasm. January 2009-"Tom Watson MP, minister for digital engagement,UK, said open source software would be on a level playing field with proprietary software such as Windows. Open source software will be adopted "when it delivers best value for money", the government said. It added that public services should where possible avoid being "locked into proprietary software". Licenses for the use of open source software are generally free of charge and embrace open standards, and the code that powers the programs can be modified without fear of trampling on intellectual property or copyright" March 2009-France's Gendarmerie Nationale, the country's national police force, says it has saved millions of dollars by migrating its desktop software infrastructure away from Microsoft Windows and replacing it with the Ubuntu Linux distribution. For a comprehensive view on how the Open Source movement has changed the Education , please refer to: http://oedb.org/library/features/how-the-open-source-movement-has-change... Our government should be wary of companies who are wrecking havoc in bankrupt countries like Iceland on one hand where MS has been pushing hard to get MS resellers to pay up for licenses they sold to companies(which) have now gone bankrupt, and using empty patents to threaten the others in rest of the world. With Windows Vista, Encarta and other stuff going down the drain, Indian govt should not allow itself to be locked down into proprietary companies like these. Further Mr Bajwa should take a fresher course which Wikipedia would provide about the business model of Open Source as he stupidly warns about so called "pitfalls" of things which are FREE-only if understood what FREE means in the FOSS community and why the network effects and economies of scale bring down the cost of software produced by FOSS volunteers, but then he won't be blowing the horn of the wrong side-if he understood anything. Please stop misguiding others!

Submitted by Venkatesh Hariharan on 04/01/2009 - 15:15:44 PM.

Open Source is a development model based on collaboration, community and the collective ownership of code. The fact that no one person or company monopolizes the code has made Open Source Software attractive to developing countries like China, Brazil, South Africa and many others. The freedom to modify the source code, improve the software and share it with others makes open source ideal for e-government, education and other sectors in India. With most Open Source Software, the software is free and users have the choice of paying for value added services like support, training and customization. This eliminates the expensive licensing fees associated with proprietary software. Linux is also available in more than 11 Indian languages (see www.indlinux.org) thanks to active linguistic groups that are working on translations. Therefore, the open source versus proprietary software debate is not a "technology battle" as Mr. Bajwa claims but a question of different software development models. One model is open, collaborative and inclusive. The other is closed, non-inclusive and often traps users by locking them in through proprietary standards. Check out the Ministry of Company Affairs web site (www.mca21.gov.in) that has been built using proprietary software tools. This forces users to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer (which means using Windows and thus paying Microsoft). In other words, by an act of omission or commission, the government is forcing users to support a software monopoly. When widely accepted World Wide Web Consortium standards (www.w3c.org) are available and allow users to access W3C compliant web sites through any browser, what was the need to get locked in to a proprietary technology? Ten years ago when we started www.IndLinux.org, in our effort to bridge the digital divide and create software in Indian languages, we chose to go with open source because the freedom to share the software meant that the largest number of Indians would benefit from our work. For reasons of openness, transparency, compliance to standards, avoidance of vendor lock-in and affordability, we believe that open source is the best bet for India in the long-term. Venkatesh Hariharan www.indlinux.org www.osindia.blogspot.com

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