Article 19 | Limits to Exemptions

(1) Purpose and Financial Equilibrium: To safeguard the operational sustainability, compute testbed accessibility, and administrative capacity of OpenBharat.net, the OpenBharat.net Governing Council (OBGC), in concurrence with the ISAIL Secretariat, may establish dynamic thresholds governing the active roster of fee-exempt Alliance Members (Contributors) admitted under Article 14 and Article 17.

(2) Dynamic Capacity Management:

• Rather than imposing rigid demographic quotas, the OBGC may regulate the intake of new fee-exempt Contributor members based on verifiable operational metrics, including:

  • Available technical maintainer bandwidth and administrative capacity of active OpenBharat.net Working Groups (OWGs);

  • Computational allocation limits, testbed infrastructure costs, and server cluster availability; and

  • The financial ratio of fee-paying institutional members (Technical Tier) required to support core repository and legal infrastructure.

• Where total active fee-exempt members exceed the sustainable administrative capacity of the Secretariat, the OBGC may declare a temporary intake pause on new gratis applications or institute an active waiting pool pursuant to Article 6(10).

(3) Merit-Based Prioritisation: If intake limits or waiting pools are triggered under paragraph (2), the OBGC shall prioritise candidate admissions based on verifiable technical necessity:

• High-impact foundational engineering contributions, particularly in neurosymbolic systems, sovereign compute hacks, open-weight tooling, and world models;

• Research entities operating localized regional diffusion testbeds or empirical sandboxes across Tier-2/Tier-3 district corridors in India; and

• Underrepresented developer collectives, academic labs, and non-profit open-source maintainers lacking institutional funding channels.

(4) Periodic Review: The OBGC shall review operational capacity and Contributor intake metrics semi-annually, adjusting onboarding thresholds to maintain OpenBharat.net's commitment to broad, community-driven sovereign AI collaboration without compromising fiscal solvency.