LUCKNOW: The Hiranandani Group will be setting up UP’s first data centre in Greater Noida. The centre will come up over an area of 20 acre with an investment of Rs 600 crore. The company had approached UP Government about three weeks ago and due to the size of its investment, the proposal was fast-tracked and land allocated to it almost immediately.
A government spokesperson said that the Hiranandani Group had set up similar data centres in Mumbai, Chennai and Hyderabad. The government has already received proposals of about Rs 10,000 crore from companies like Adani Group, RackBank and Earth Company. Sources say that there is likely to be major movement in this industry once the state’s data policy is ready, expected to be released within the next few weeks.
Even as India is still a growing digital economy and has a huge potential for data generation and storage, only about 20% of the data generated within the country is stored domestically while the rest is stored in data centres located in other countries.
While giving the company clearance to set up, chief minister Yogi Adityanath said that the data centre would open up several avenues for generating employment and give a boost to IT companies which are likely to come up around the data centre.
“These data centres have a massive electricity consumption and so it has been decided to give them open access connections,” a government spokesperson said.
Additional chief secretary (IT) Alok Kumar said that a bill on data was pending in parliament and with UP’s own policy under preparation, there was tremendous interest in setting up centres and parks in the country. “The department has drafted a policy on data but it is in the process of being finalised. Other than land, these projects, which have a massive power consumption, will require special arrangements for power supply, an affordable tariff, etc. All these aspects will be addressed in the policy. Once that is announced, we can expect more projects to come up, along with a host of other IT companies,” Kumar said.
Data centres are a collection of servers where data, related to social media, banking, retail activity, health services, etc is stored. These are highly capital intensive projects with limited scope for direct employment but lead to huge indirect employment.