India's largest national data centre to come up in Bhopal

The government will be setting up the country’s largest national data centre in Bhopal, with capacity for 500,000 virtual servers.

The country has four such centres for hosting government websites, services and apps. These are at Pune, Hyderabad, Delhi and Bhubaneswar.

With growing digitalisation of government services, this capacity needs to be increased. 

Electronics and information technology minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said data protection and privacy were important and its misuse would not be allowed. He was addressing journalists on four years of the present government. 

He said the rural Business Process Outsourcing scheme would be extended to 100,000 seats from the current 48,000, as it was a good job creator.

He issued a strong defence of Aadhaar, the citizen identification and monitoring system. He said the programme, the world’s largest biometric identification ones, “has already established its benefits for the public”. Nearly Rs 4 trillion has been disbursed till date on direct benefits transfer, with a saving of Rs 900 billion from removing fictitious beneficiaries over these four years.