Reuters is reporting today that Sachin Dabir, who heads enterprise sales at Red Hat in India, is expecting Linux to have a 10% market share in India by March 2004, which indicates that in his view India's 400,000-strong community of developers is presently migrating from Windows at a pretty brisk rate.

Reminding us that India already has 60 % of the offshore IT services market, which Gartner estimates put at being worth $16 billion, the Reuters report indicates that "Business Process Outsourcing" is therefore going to be fueled by Linux, not Windows. At 400,000 rupees for Windows versus 40,000 rupees for Red Hat, it's a no-brainer.

The report quotes Gartner India's Partha Iyengar, a market researcher. "India is a key battleground for Microsoft as it tries to get a pool of developers loyal to its computing platform." This is not going to be easy: the Indian federal government recently launched a "Linux India Initiative" to use the system in schools and state agencies and thereby save cash.

Linux already drives India's National Stock Exchange, Bombay's Breach Candy hospital, and is also the favorite of the national agency making supercomputers.

"Open source fits perfectly with India's needs," S. Ramakrishnan, director at India's IT ministry told Reuters.

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