India’s FOSS community has not had a sustained public policy engagement with the Indian government due to the fragmented nature of the FOSS community and the lack of interest from FOSS companies. The net result is that while India has some of the most FOSS friendly policies, we lack an overarching FOSS strategy for India, and suffer from poor implementation of existing policies. The community also suffers from a lack of representation in Indian policy discussions around open source, technology procurement, open standards, software patents and other critical topics that impact the FOSS community. In fact, most members of the Indian FOSS community are not even aware of the significance and impact of the policy issues listed above. 

This lack of engagement has led to a low-level equilibrium where the community is unaware of policy issues, and FOSS friendly policy makers do not have credible players to engage with from the FOSS community. In this talk, I explain how FOSS United is working with policy makers, some of our key policy engagements and how you can help as a volunteer.