Indian States Adopting ODF
One by one, states and city governments in India are adopting ODF as their standard file format:
“India has already made a lot of progress with regard to ‘open standard.’ There are about 10 states which are fairly pro-active and have made significant progress in implementing e-governance projects.
“For instance, the Department of IT, Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi, adopted the OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard, and as a result has saved around 78 percent in costs by eliminating the need to purchase proprietary office suites or licenses. This has encouraged other government departments to adopt open standards instead of proprietary softwares.
“The high court of Allahabad is another case in point. It moved all its electronic documents to ODF because it felt that it was cost-effective and safe to store its documents in a format which is open and also to carry out any kind of information exchange through open standards. So is the case with the West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu governments.
“Even the Election Commission decided to migrate to OpenOffice.org after the elections of May-June 2006.”