Supporting NMG 2026

FOSS United is pitching in to support the 2026 Nagarathna Memorial Grant.

NMG was started as a yearly ₹1,00,000 no-strings-attached, micro-grant to support meaningful work happening in India by Thejesh GN. Thejesh is a FOSS and Open Data veteran, and was also one of the organisers of the Open Data devroom at IndiaFOSS 2025. He is the co-founder and chairman of DataMeet, the biggest community of data science and open data enthusiasts in India.

“The reason for the grant could be anything as long its meaningful to you and people around. Though I prefer free and open source or creative commons projects, It’s not a must. It’s a no strings attached grant.”

Over the years, NMG has supported FOSS/digital commons work across Design, Geospatial technology, FOSS mirrors and infra, and more. If you have been active in the FOSS United community, you will find a lot of familiar names in the list of past NMG grantees. It’s always interesting for us to discover channels that have organically developed a pool of people doing interesting digital commons work, and we want to support such initiatives. This is part of a new experiment on our part to identify “Lighthouses in the Digital Commons”, i.e., people who have been bringing people together in the digital commons for many years. Supporting “Lighthouses” enables us to expand our reach, while also platforming the work of the “Lighthouse”.

In 2026, FOSS United Foundation will be contributing INR 2L to NMG, which brings the total grants pool to INR 5L as of February 2026. Our support is not restricted to code or technical contributions, but any work in the public commons, including data, design, services, art, documentation, research, or tangible creations under FOSS/Creative Commons licenses.

You can apply for a grant here