Start a company. Lookout for tenders floated by the government. Quote a price that's less than what others quote.

Correct me if I am wrong please. In this case, Maharastra govt. simply first appointed MS (or one of its "solution providers") to consult on what to do. NOT surprisingly, they did NOT recommend any free, or non MS software, and now MS is providing all the solutions.

So, I suspect there was NO open tender process. If there had been an open process, Novell/RH/Suse could have tried.

Hope that no one's getting kickbacks.

That is where we need PILs.. thats the only way for taxpayers to ensure that governments use their hard-earned money judiciously...

I am NOT saying never use taxpayers money to BUY MS or any other company's products... Just transparently evaluate all the options, and chose the best one. If a government department only needs to use computers to be able to use some kind of intranet, some spread sheets, emails and word processing.. (which usually accounts for the 90% of computer usage), we do have FREE alternatives such as KOffice, OpenOffice and free cross platform browsers which can run on free OS desktops (Linux, BSD or whatever).