In the last wikimedia meetup, I heard stories of how govt. libraries' digitization efforts were failing because of a lack of technology direction and infrastructure (Someone said, one of the library was simply scanning up all its books into TIFF).

Good news is that problems such as these may become a thing of past when the government adopts FOSS technology as the way to go for all its needs. This could also stir the FOSS movement in India.

The policy has been cleared by the Department of Information Technology and the National Informatics Centre and is likely to be made official soon. This effectively means the technology used in all government departments and offices would have to shift to an open standard. With rough estimates putting the e-governance market at around $10 billion, the new system—at the interface and data-archival levels—will shake up big companies hitherto operating in these segments through their proprietary (read paid-for) standards.