This seems like a recipe for a failed project - a government agency building an OS. Either that or it will be another linux fork branded as "Government of India."
It sounds to me like a recipe for a successful project, if your definition of success is extracting money from the government. The technical aspect, of course, sounds pretty dodgy.
Turkey has done it. US has done it. Other have done it.
The US?
SELinux is an NSA product.
Google suggests many governments have done it. And they're all linux variants.
Why are you fixating on "Linux variants/forks"? Is there something inherently undesirable about them?
No, it's just that the linked article says that India is going to be designing and developing a completely new architecture, and I'm suggesting that no country has ever done that. And that the likely result will be monstrous cost and time overruns followed by a quick and dirty forking and rebranding of linux to save face.
I don't have a link to the official announcement, so I can't be certain, but I doubt they're going to build their own hardware architecture. It's reasonable to think they will develop a new OS; one can only hope to see an actual OS based on the principles behind Minix, but that's my little dream world there. :-)
It means they didn't actually write the OS themself.