Indian State of Kerala Has Saved Over US$400 million by Choosing Linux for its Schools
Southern Indian state Kerala is known for its beautiful backwaters. Kerala is also known for its education policy. The first 100% literate Indian state has made IT classes mandatory in schools since 2003 and around 2005 they started to adopt free and open source software. It was a long term plan to boot out proprietary software from the education system.
As a result, the state claimed to save around $50 million per year in licensing costs in 2015. Further expanding their open source mission, Kerala is going to put Linux with open source educational software on over 200,000 school computers and ‘claims’ to save around $428 million in the process, reported Financial Express.
The preparation is ongoing for the country’s largest ICT (information and Communication Technology) training for teachers is in full-swing. Over 150,000 primary teachers will be trained to use educational software running on Linux under this training.
K Anvar Sadath, vice-chairman and executive director of KITE (Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education), disclosed that from the next academic year, more than 200,000 computers in schools will be running Linux. KITE has created their own distribution named IT@School GNU/Linux based on Ubuntu. The latest version of this custom distribution runs on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS version. This custom distribution has several free and open source applications specially customized for state school curriculum.
