Premier Indian institutes spent ₹134 crore on proprietary software in 5 years

An open source advocacy group has said that Indian universities and premier technical institutes spent at least ₹134 crore over the last five years on licences for proprietary software. The figure was arrived at by FOSS United based on responses to queries filed under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005.

FOSS United argues that institutions spend significant sums annually teaching students software they will never own. The collective has set up a portal to map software spending across higher education and research bodies. The expenditure covers a range of tools, from email and assignment submission platforms to engineering design and electronic design automation (EDA) software used for chip design.

The group believes the ₹134 crore figure is likely an undercount. Sai Rahul Poruri, CEO of FOSS United, said the spending captured so far represents only about 15-20% of premier public institutes. He noted that the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) were not included in the data, and their expenditure on engineering software could be an order of magnitude higher. Based on the current annual figure of roughly ₹25 crore, he estimated that annual spending on software licences across the higher education sector could be at least ₹200 crore, translating to ₹1,000 crore over five years.

Mr. Poruri highlighted a tension between the Union government's push for technological sovereignty and the continued reliance on proprietary platforms by third parties that could withdraw services at any time. He said technology sovereignty is often viewed narrowly as a geopolitical need, rather than addressing tech dependence across industries.

The Union government has policies encouraging open source software, but proprietary lock-ins persist in several areas. In the semiconductor sector, for instance, Information Technology Secretary S. Krishnan said at a press conference on August 31 that while the government would encourage open source frameworks like RISC-V for chip building, it would also help startups and academia access mature proprietary platforms widely used in industry, such as ARM and IBM Power. He said the goal was to produce an India-made chip faster with adequate Indian intellectual property.

Mr. Poruri argued that higher education structured around proprietary software is incompatible with first-principles thinking, as it teaches tool usage rather than foundational understanding. He said transitioning to building and using open source tools would help students develop multidisciplinary skills, especially as AI makes it easier to learn by building rather than by using.