With the aim to make India a Global Data Centre hub, promote investment in the sector, propel digital economy growth, enable provisioning of trusted hosting infrastructure to fulfil the growing demand of the country and facilitate state of the art service delivery to citizens the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology has issued The Draft Data Centre Policy, 2020 for discussion.
The Policy is applicable for Data Centre park developers/Data Centre operators as well as the allied ecosystem of Data Centre sector.
The key objectives of the Policy :
1. Drive necessary regulatory, structural and procedural interventions for enabling ease of doing business in the sector for attracting investments and accelerating the existing pace of Data Centre growth in the country.
2. Promote sector competitiveness through various fiscal and non-fiscal incentives.
3. Promote domestic start-ups, MSMEs and other Indian IT companies and provide impetus to indigenous manufacturing of IT and non-IT equipment.
4. Facilitate access to uninterrupted and cost-effective power, which forms one of the most critical aspects for operating the Data Centre.
5. Implement measures to bring in necessary improvement in network backhaul, domestic as well as international.
6. Meet the data security needs by promoting investments in trusted (safe and secure) Data Centres in India.
7. Facilitate standardization in the development of Data Centres.
8. Promote capacity building in the sector through association with various skilling / human resource development programs.
Strategies to be adopted for growth of Data Centre Sector:
1. Enabling Ease of Doing Business
2. Enabling a favourable ecosystem for the operations of Data Centres
3. Setting-up of Data Centre Economic Zones
4. Promote indigenous technology development, research and capacity building
5. Institutional Mechanism for Policy governance
While the Data Centre sector is witnessing growth in the country, there are known obstacles to its growth such as lack of infrastructure or Industry status of the Data Centres, complex clearance processes, time consuming approvals, high cost of power, lack of published standards, absence of specialised building norms for building the Data Centres, etc that the policy aims to remedy.
The Policy lays down framework including various structural / regulatory interventions, investment promotion in the sector, possible Incentivization mechanisms along with the institutional mechanism required for the governance.
Source : Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology
