Bengaluru, 06th October 2021: With support from the state government and the Centre, Karnataka and its capital city Bengaluru are emerging as major stakeholders in growth of datacentres in India, Dr C.N. Ashwathnarayan, Minister for Higher Education; IT & BT, Science & Technology; Skill Development, Entrepreneurship & Livelihood, Government of Karnataka said at an ASSOCHAM virtual event
“We welcome feedbacks and suggestions especially from industry bodies such as ASSOCHAM to make Karnataka the datacentre hub of the country. The Government of India has taken-up localization of data keeping in mind the safety, security, privacy concerns and the accelerated pace of digitalization due to the impact of Covid-19 will trigger a strong demand for datacentres,” said Dr Ashwathnarayan addressing the 2nd Edition of “India Smart Datacentres & Cloud Infrastructure Summit 2021 organized by ASSOCHAM.
Earlier delivering her inaugural address at the ASSOCHAM conference, Ms Anupriya Patel, Union Minister of State for Commerce & Industry highlighted the initiatives being undertaken by the Government to address the emerging opportunities for datacentres in the country.
In her address, Ms Patel said that the Hyperscale datacentre scheme is likely to attract INR 3 lakh crore investment in the next 5 years. “Digital India is a priority for the government. An incentive scheme worth 12,000 crores in the works to facilitate installation of datacentres in the country. The government also aims to attract 3 lakh crores investment in the next 5 years as part of the Hyperscale datacentre scheme and intends to provide 3-4% of capital investment as incentive along with faster approvals.”
She added, “The Datacentre Policy 2020 is an important step towards driving the necessary regulatory and structural reforms in the industry. The policy will drive ease-of-doing business in the sector, attract more investments and facilitate capacity building. MEITY’s draft policy for datacentres will also provide infrastructure status to the sector.”
In his address, Mr Vineet Agarwal, ASSOCHAM President said, “A new wave of revolution and transformation characterised by digitalisation has emerged. India is among the frontrunner in digital economy and datacentres are the backbone of any digital activity. The Government of India has been quite proactive in making sure that the datacentre industry is moving in the right directions. The Indian datacentre market is expected to attract investment of $5 billion by 2026. With the right investments and policies ASSOCHAM strongly believes that industry will achieve Government of India’s dream of making India a Global Data Hub.”
Sharing his views, Mr Deepak Sood, Secretary General, ASSOCHAM said, “With an average 14.6 GB per month, India has the second highest mobile data consumption in the world. The size of the digital population and growth of digital economy necessitates a strong growth in datacentres. With the digital economy estimated to grow to $1 trillion by 2025 there is a huge potential for investments in datacentres in India. The Datacentre and Cloud council at ASSOCHAM has been working towards achieving government of India’s vison of Making India a Global Datacentre 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.”
Leading experts and industry captains attending the summit also engaged in a positive exchange of views and ideas.
“Being one of the largest and fastest growing economies in Asia-Pacific and the world, India presents numerous opportunities in the digital age. Datacentres offering Interconnected Digital Infrastructure with a global footprint and dense ecosystem of Telecom Service Provides, ISPs, Cloud Service Providers, Internet Exchanges and Businesses across verticals are well-positioned to be a critical part as well as a driving force of the digital revolution in India, helping businesses to leverage the digital infrastructure to grow their business domestically and globally,” Mr Manoj Paul, Managing Director- EquinixIndia.
“India is currently undergoing a digital revolution. This evolution needs datacentres. With the right environment - India has the ability to be the green data processing capital of the world,” Mr Darshan Hiranandani, Chairman, ASSOCHAM National Council on Datacentres.
“India’s datacentre needs are growing exponentially because of increasing data consumption and creation by both enterprises and individuals. The onset of 5G and access to cheaper mobile phones and data plans have accelerated this trend leading to the rapid adoption of OTT platforms, e-commerce, and social media. On the enterprise front, the growing trend of migration from captive datacentres to colocation service providers has been among the primary drivers along with the evolving use cases around emerging technologies such as AI/ML and IoT. demand a new breed of data infrastructure. With the government’s push towards Digital India, the digitalization game will be taken to a new level, and so will the need for a robust, top tier quality, highly scalable, and cost-efficient datacentre infrastructure. These factors, coupled with the focus on data localization, will only lead to the need for global datacentre campuses in India. These are exciting times, and the industry must prepare itself today to drive the transformation of tomorrow. We, at Yotta, are very optimistic and bullish about these trends and have geared ourselves for future capacity creation accordingly,” Mr Sunil Gupta Co-Founder & CEO, Yotta Infrastructure.
“Due to increased demand from BFSI, transportation, logistics, e-commerce, and government sector, the India market is witnessing tremendous investment from Colocation service providers which is further fuelled by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Several global collocation and datacentre service providers have expressed keen interest in the Indian datacentre sector, which is expected to help the sector develop and this would further promote the growth of a variety of allied sectors such as telecommunications, IT Infrastructure and construction, and thus catalyse the development of the entire economy,” Mr Amit Singh, Partner, Advisory Services, PwC.
Mr Sridhar Pinnapureddy, Chairman, CtrlS and Cloud4C also shared insights on the importance of datacentres, opportunities and way forward.
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