Once a working computer is available commercially, A mandate would be issued by the central government ministries to 250+ Public Sector Undertaking ( Companies with >50% govt equity) to procure only these RISCV computers. This way we can definitely bring it up to speed real fast.
PS: From my experience working currently for one of those PSUs .
I doubt this will happen, even if they do issue a mandate.
Indian government computers are still running windows 7 or so and its hard to get them to switch to Linux.
What happens when theyre forced to run Linux and a new architecture ? All of them will just obtain exemptions to continue using windows + x86 claiming some software they need doesnt work.
Teaching a 50 year govt employee how to use QEMU + Wine to emulate x86 and then run a translation layer to run windows software is impossible.
> Indian government computers are still running windows 7 or so and its hard to get them to switch to Linux.
In many ways, switching from Win7 to Linux is more convenient than going with Win 10 and more recent MS products. This is a significant opportunity where real change might be possible.
Win7 software tends to run quite well in Wine. Of course some things like document/spreadsheet macros are more problematic, but those are not that common and can be rewritten.
If the government makes a political decision, it can and does browbeat PSUs into compliance. There will be a lot of teething troubles and loss of productivity. But the thing is it won't matter for PSUs, nobody expects them to be highly efficient. I remember reading years ago that IDBI (A quasi-PSU Bank) switched to Linux for their terminals. The core banking for most Indian banks is powered by Finacle on Linux.
PS: From my experience working currently for one of those PSUs .