India has quietly become one of the world’s largest contributors to open-source technology — and the impact extends far beyond Silicon Valley code repositories. Indian developers and government agencies have built open-source platforms that serve hundreds of millions of citizens daily, from digital learning to healthcare to financial inclusion. These are not side projects. They are mission-critical systems that power a nation.
While India’s IT services industry has long been known for building software for others, a new generation of developers and institutions is building technology for India itself — and sharing it with the world. Here is how open source is shaping India’s public digital infrastructure and what it means for the country’s future. For context on how the government is backing this technology push, see our coverage of India’s $1.5B AI infrastructure investment.
India Stack: The Foundation of Digital Public Goods
India Stack is arguably the most ambitious open-source digital infrastructure project in the world. It is a set of open APIs and digital platforms built on open standards that provide identity, payments, and data sharing for 1.4 billion people.
The core components:
- Aadhaar: A biometric identity system covering 1.38 billion Indians — the world’s largest digital ID program. The eKYC APIs built on Aadhaar have enabled banks to onboard customers in minutes instead of weeks
- UPI (Unified Payments Interface): An open, interoperable payments protocol that processed 12.02 billion transactions worth $230 billion in December 2024 alone (NPCI data). UPI is now being adopted by Singapore, UAE, France, and other countries
- DigiLocker: A cloud-based document storage platform linked to Aadhaar, holding verified copies of government-issued documents for over 270 million users
- ONDC (Open Network for Digital Commerce): An open protocol for ecommerce that aims to break platform monopolies by letting any buyer app connect with any seller app through a shared, decentralized network
What makes India Stack remarkable is that it is built on open APIs and open protocols. Any developer, any company, any government agency can build on top of it. The result is an ecosystem where a small fintech startup in Jaipur has the same access to digital payment rails as the largest bank in Mumbai.
“India has built the most sophisticated digital public infrastructure in the world,” says Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys and architect of Aadhaar. “And we did it by making it open, interoperable, and population-scale from day one.”
DIKSHA: Open-Source Education for 300 Million Students
DIKSHA (Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing) is India’s national education platform, built on the open-source Sunbird framework. Launched by the Ministry of Education, DIKSHA provides free digital learning resources in 36 languages across all states and union territories.
The numbers are staggering:
- Over 300 million students and teachers use the platform
- 5.5 billion+ learning sessions recorded since launch
- Content includes textbook-linked QR codes, interactive quizzes, video lessons, and teacher training modules
- Built entirely on Sunbird, an open-source framework hosted on GitHub that any country can fork and deploy
During the COVID-19 pandemic, DIKSHA became the backbone of remote education across Indian government schools. While private edtech companies scrambled to build platforms, DIKSHA was already deployed at scale — because it was built as open infrastructure, not a proprietary product.
Countries including Brazil, Sri Lanka, and several African nations have adopted or studied the Sunbird framework for their own education platforms. It is a textbook example (no pun intended) of how open-source software built for India can serve the world.
CoWIN: Open-Source Vaccine Management at Scale
During India’s COVID-19 vaccination drive — the largest vaccination program in human history — the technology backbone was CoWIN, an open-source platform for vaccine scheduling, tracking, and certificate generation.
CoWIN managed:
- 2.2 billion vaccine doses administered and tracked
- Real-time slot booking for 300,000+ vaccination centers
- Digital vaccination certificates verified via QR codes — accepted internationally
- Integration with Aadhaar for identity verification and DigiLocker for certificate storage
The Indian government released CoWIN’s source code as open-source, and over 140 countries expressed interest in adopting it. The platform demonstrated that population-scale health tech does not need to be built by big tech companies — it can be built by government teams using open standards and shared infrastructure.
Aarogya Setu: Contact Tracing With Transparency
When India needed a COVID-19 contact tracing app in early 2020, Aarogya Setu was built and launched in just 21 days. It became one of the fastest-adopted mobile apps in history, reaching 100 million downloads within 40 days of launch.
After initial criticism about privacy concerns, the government took a significant step: it open-sourced the entire codebase on GitHub, allowing security researchers, privacy advocates, and developers to audit the code. The move demonstrated that transparency and speed are not mutually exclusive.
Aarogya Setu combined Bluetooth contact tracing with self-assessment tools, telemedicine access, and vaccination scheduling. At its peak, over 230 million Indians had the app installed.
MOSIP: India’s Open-Source Gift to Global Identity
The Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP) takes the lessons learned from building Aadhaar and packages them into a reusable, open-source digital identity platform that any country can deploy.
Developed by the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIIT-B) with support from the Gates Foundation, MOSIP is currently being adopted by 11 countries including Morocco, Philippines, Ethiopia, Guinea, and Togo. It provides:
- Biometric enrollment and deduplication
- Secure credential issuance
- Authentication services
- Full data privacy and security compliance
MOSIP is a powerful example of India exporting not just software services, but digital governance infrastructure as a public good.
The Indian Open-Source Developer Community
India is now the second-largest contributor to open source on GitHub, behind only the United States. According to GitHub’s 2024 Octoverse report, India has over 17 million developers on the platform, with open-source contributions growing at 28% year-over-year.
Key initiatives driving this growth:
- GirlScript Summer of Code: India’s largest open-source program for beginners, engaging thousands of students annually in real-world open-source projects
- Hacktoberfest India: Local chapters and community events encourage developers across the country to make their first open-source contributions
- FOSS United: A foundation dedicated to promoting Free and Open Source Software in India, organizing conferences, hackathons, and advocacy campaigns
- Government initiatives: The Ministry of Electronics and IT actively promotes open-source adoption in government projects through its policy on adoption of open-source software
Indian developers are not just consuming open source — they are building and maintaining critical projects. From Linux kernel contributions to Kubernetes, React Native, and Hasura (a popular open-source GraphQL engine founded in Bangalore), Indian talent is deeply embedded in the global open-source ecosystem.
Challenges and the Road Ahead
India’s open-source journey is not without challenges:
- Sustainability: Many open-source projects lack long-term funding. Government projects depend on political will, and community projects rely on volunteer labor that burns out
- Digital divide: While platforms like DIKSHA and UPI reach hundreds of millions, rural connectivity gaps mean the poorest populations are often the last to benefit. Our report on smart villages closing the urban-rural divide explores this challenge in depth
- Privacy and security: Open-sourcing code improves transparency but also exposes vulnerabilities. Continuous security auditing is essential for platforms handling biometric and health data
- Talent retention: Indian open-source developers are in high global demand. Keeping talent focused on domestic public good projects requires competitive compensation and meaningful mission alignment
Why This Matters for India’s Future
India’s open-source movement is not just a technology story — it is a sovereignty story. By building critical digital infrastructure on open standards rather than proprietary platforms, India retains control over its own digital destiny. No single company can hold the country’s payment system, identity infrastructure, or education platform hostage.
The approach also positions India as a digital public goods exporter. Just as India exports pharmaceuticals and IT services, it now exports digital governance frameworks that developing nations can adopt without vendor lock-in or crippling licensing fees.
For the next generation of Indian developers — many of them young people building technology as a force for social good, as we explored in our story on student-led NGOs solving India’s toughest problems — open source is not just a methodology. It is a philosophy: build it once, share it freely, and let a billion people benefit.