- budgets, accounts and purchasing
- permits, such as permission to build a house or open a shop
- courts and tax collection
- services for citizens, such as payments, certificates and complaints
- emergency calls
The buyers are governments at every level: national, state and city. Companies that sell software to governments are called govtech companies.
How governments buy. Governments buy software differently from companies. Most buy through a public tender. The government publishes what it needs, companies submit bids, and fixed rules decide the winner. A sale can take a year or more, and contracts last for years. Once a system is running, governments rarely replace it, because switching is risky and needs a new tender. So government software changes slowly. Old systems, called legacy systems, stay in use for decades.
Who builds it in India. In India, most government software is not bought from product companies. It is built by:
- the National Informatics Centre (NIC), the government's own technology organisation
- IT services firms, hired through tenders to build and run systems
(More on them in the services-world collection.) - nonprofits, such as
eGov Foundation , described below
India has also built shared national systems that any government office or company can build on: Aadhaar for identity, UPI for payments and DigiLocker for documents. These are called digital public infrastructure.
Why most companies here build for America. America has about 90,000 local governments: cities, counties, school districts and others. Each needs the same kinds of software, for budgets, permits and courts. Most are too small to build their own. So product companies sell them ready-made software, more and more as a subscription run in the cloud. Several of these American govtech companies build their products in Pune and Bengaluru.
Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.
Keep reading, free
One more section is on this page: Budgets, permits, courts and emergency calls. Sign in to read it here, in full.
Continue with Google- Budgets, permits, courts and emergency calls
Running a local government. Three companies build this software in India for American cities and counties.
Locating an emergency caller. When someone calls for help from a mobile phone, the emergency services need to know exactly where the caller is. The mobile network on its own knows only roughly.
One open platform for many Indian cities. India's cities often follow a different model from America's. Instead of each city buying its own product, many cities and states share one open-source platform.
Two companies covered mainly in other Market Segments also sell to governments:
India's digital public infrastructure lets a citizen get a service without visiting an office. Aadhaar, UPI and DigiLocker work as shared rails that any service can run on. AI models now add the ability to ask for a service by voice, in your own language. Governments are cautious buyers, though. The open question is how far they will let AI models decide, not just answer.
Who these companies hire, and for what, is on What govtech and nonprofit companies hire for.