I would imagine the simpler explanation is that a few "scientists" at CDAC need to justify their existence and have convinced programming illiterate politicians/bureaucrats they are doing something useful fo a change.

And from what we can see, it's not deserved.

Also, you are under the impression that if it was not for Government, we would have never seen GPS OR Internet or cryptographic progress. I would highly doubt that. I am sure that market would have produced similar (or even exact) solutions without all the waste.

EDIT:

Yes, government provide us with GPS technology but it was free market which made it accessible to everyone. Can you imagine government being able to envision that one can fit navigation tool inside a phone which fits in my pocket?

One is millions to billions of man hours, the other in the low thousands. They're not synonyms.

I've written scrapers to gather data from these sites for my website, and besides dealing with the above mentioned issues, I have to constantly beware of not overloading their servers - as an example, simply fetching the next page for each MP listed in http://164.100.47.132/LssNew/Members/Alphabaticallist.aspx without a timeout crashes their servers :(.

[Tangential: I want the Indian Government to come up with its own cryptographic protocols/algorithms like the NIST in the US does. Even if it is a variant of the prevalent crypto systems, it is better than nothing, at least for the top secret documents.

Anybody know what crypto algorithms/protocols the Govts other than US use for their classified information?]

Why? They could just use the standard algorithms that have been proven hard to crack in the open.

Fwiw they do use their own algorithms. I know (and have worked with) people doing exactly this. Like most of the NSA's work in the USA what they do is classified. I am sure every government worth its name does similair things.

Eh, this is arguably bad. Cryptpography is only secure with massive peer review. The United States manages because the NSA is one of the largest cryptographic organizations in the world. Very few governments have the specialty mathematicians, cryptographs, and computer scientists to establish a suitable internal peer review process. India may be one of those countries, but I'm not sure.

BOSS, the Debian-based Linux flavor mentioned in the article, has been available for quite some time (atleast 3 years). IMO, haven't seen anybody using it (including majority of people who developed it - NRCFOSS and C-DAC)

When the defense ministry of the fourth largest military power is involved, there are reasons.

Govt. in India has had a poor track record in technology and overspending too.

That said, I do agree with you that Indian Gov have had some past cases of overspending. But when things like 9/11 (New York) and 26/11 (Mumbai) happen, it's the Government we blame first. India is shifting towards a massive (given the population) National electronic ID infrastructure, security is needed.

Moreover, creating an OS is hardly a significant expense in a country's budget. After an event like 26/11 and given the fact that India is about to host multiple worldwide sporting events in next 1-2 years, this hardly looks like a waste.

That is one confused assessment of reality dude. Are you like saying guzzling down millions means nothing for a poor country like India?

And dude saying "TOI is world's largest bla bla" and then commenting The articles are badly written does really prove your mental state, is it?

I was commenting on Pluggd.in article being written badly.

How is a new operating system supposed to ensure better passwords? 99% of break ins are because of really lame passwords, isn't that true?

Creating your own OS is for that reason like inventing your own type of house because you never remember to lock your door.

You would probably not need a new operating system, since revamping logins (and similar) stuff would suffice. But you could get rid of passwords.

For e.g. Harfbuzz - the unified text layout engine for Linux. The competing technology is SIL-Graphite, which supports Smartfonts and compound alphabets. So what does Harfbuzz say ?

For established scripts though, there is not much reason to prefer Graphite over OpenType.

I am Indian and support this exercise - maybe 90% of it will be waste, maybe 10% wont be. Maybe finally we will have a Linux Desktop Summit in India, which is potentially the biggest market for open source software.