"Why can't NIC (National Informatics Centre) launch a company in which NIC has 49 per cent and private sector players have 51 per cent that can manage cloud and cater to the needs of the private sector," Sibal asked while inaugurating Meghraj, a cloud computing service developed by NIC for government departments.
Cloud computing facilitates sharing of resources, software and information on the Internet for a fee. It can help companies to cut costs as they do not have to invest heavily in infrastructure.
"This is a great milestone. There will be lot of savings in this project as infrastructure will be provided by government of India. Even the manpower, software programmes will be provided by us," Sibal said.
The minister said the government should look at providing a similar service to the private sector, especially medium and small-scale enterprises that don't have the money or the expertise to modernise their business.
"Economy works on the basis of the private sector. To make the private sector more efficient, you should launch a cloud with private sector. MSME (micro, small and medium enterprises) is not competitive with the rest of the world because each of them cannot have separate manpower, separate infrastructure for computing facility," he said.
"You provide expertise, security, basic service...Tell the private sector to focus on its needs and then create a cloud computing facility where the private sector is served so that they are more competitive in international market," Sibal said.
J Satyanarayana, secretary in the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, said the JV formation "will be done in three months.