Govt plans ‘largest’ data centre in Bhopal

With India becoming the biggest consumer of data, the country is leaving no page unturned to strengthen its data storage capabilities. Plans are afoot to set up the country’s fifth data centre, which is expected to be the biggest so far and to be located in Bhopal.

To be undertaken by National Informatics Centre (NIC), under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), this data centre will have five lakh virtual servers, the highest so far in any centre in India.

According to senior officials at NIC, the land is already available through the Madhya Pradesh government and soon there will be ‘ground breaking ceremony’, and the building would be operational within the next two years.

“India’s digital ecosystem has got a momentum of its own and this process is going to be irreversible. And as data privacy is concerned we have always said that…data must be protected, and India should also become a good centre of data analysis because that is also becoming an emerging area,” Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister of Electronics and IT, said here on sharing the achievements of his government in the last 48 months.

Asked about data breach by foreign social media companies or data mining firms, especially when the general elections are nearing in 2019, Prasad said, “Any attempt to India’s elections by covert or overt manner, will not be tolerated.”

He also said that political parties can do campaigns through social networking sites.

BL