In line with the need to adopt & promote open governance systems, the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India has rolled out multiple national software policies aimed at popularising the use of open systems in the area of e-governance. Open systems will help in increasing transparency and innovation, preventing duplicacy and fragmentation, promoting interoperability and overall saving valuable time, effort and costs for the nation. These open systems will hopefully become a catalyst in helping lay the foundation of a truly modern era of open government.

These national software policies are as follows:

• Policy On Collaborative Application Development by Opening the Source Code of Government Applications (namely "Source Open Policy"): This policy provides a framework for archiving government source code in repositories and opening these repositories for promoting reuse, sharing and remixing.
• Policy on Adoption of Open Source Software for Government of India (namely "Open Source Policy"): This policy provides a framework for the preferred use of open source software systems in government applications and systems.
• Policy on Open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for Government of India (namely "Open API Policy"): This policy is aimed at providing a framework for opening up APIs in government applications for interoperability and integration with other e-governance systems.

OpenForge is a platform that will help in operationalizing these three policies and is intended to be used by Government Ministries, Departments, State Governments, open source communities, academic institutions, startups, IT/software companies etc. For more details on OpenForge, please go here.