The Government of India (GoI) has taken major initiatives to accelerate the development and implementation of e-Governance. The National Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance provides guidelines for the uniform and reliable implementation of e-Governance solutions. The major goals are to ensure seamless interoperability of solutions developed by multiple agencies, while improving the technology choices available and avoiding vendor lock-in.

In this context, an Expert Committee, with members from IIT Bombay, CDAC, IIM Ahmedabad and NIC, is compiling data on various technical standards relevant for E-governance, which can be recommended as open standards in various Interoperability Areas. Building upon the Interoperability Framework, earlier proposed by the Working group on Technical Standards (IFEG Version 2.4) , the identified Interoperability Areas have been categorized under 7 broad domains (Presentation Archival, Process, Data Integration, Meta-data, Data Interchange, Network access & application and Security).

The Committee's goal is to recommend technical standards in the identified Interoperability areas, after considering their openness againstthe mandatory openness characteristics listed in the Draft Policy on Open standards for e-Governance.

In this regard, the Committee has prepared a draft report with its initial findings. The draft report was published for review till February 08, 2009. We have received useful feedbacks from the reviewers, which will be helpful to revise Committee's draft report.

Please watch this page for Committee's revised report for public review.