Digital India to get Nadella push

Microsoft chief Satya Nadella on Monday met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and discussed issues pertaining to the IT sector, and ways to enhance partnership for initiatives like Digital India.

The government, on its part, told Nadella that it favoured an ‘open-source’ policy, and welcomed Microsoft’s participation in it. Nadella also met Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, MoS Finance Jayant Sinha and a host of industry leaders and developers.

The PM told Nadella that the policy behind the open-source software under Digital India was to "ensure efficiency, transparency and reliability of such services at affordable costs". 

Prasad said the open-source policy is gathering momentum across the world, and governments and enterprises are increasingly looking at leveraging the benefits of this software, which eliminates licence costs. The policy shall be applicable to all Central government organisations.  

State governments are free to adopt this policy, which makes it mandatory for all software applications and services of the government to be built using open source software, Prasad is said to have conveyed to the Microsoft CEO. 

On his part, India-born Nadella, on his third visit to his home country since taking over as Microsoft head in February 2014,  discussed country-specific projects with the PM.  

According to sources, the meeting also involved engagement of Microsoft for linking Skype and Aadhaar and enhanced cooperation for cloud services in the government sector.

Nadella’s visit comes close on the heels of Apple CEO Tim Cook's four-day tour of India. Cook had also offered support to government's initiatives like Digital India and Startup India. "Discussed various issues pertaining to the IT sector with @Microsoft CEO @satya nadella @MicrosoftIndia," Modi tweeted after the meeting. Details of the discussions were, however, not disclosed.