The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology(MeitY) is planning to come up with a policy for establishing data centres across the country. The states will be free either follow in total or develop according to that suit their needs.
Among the major policy introductions in establishing new data centres, a major push on use of renewable energy such as solar energy is likely to happen for day-to-day operations of the building which can house the data disks. This plan in use of renewable energy is because a lot of power is consumed by data centres and no cross-subsidy is available to them. Also apart from the data consumed by data trays or racks, by doing so they also want to push consumption needs of renewable energy for other buildings in which data centre is housed.
Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology(MietY) will allow states to either follow the policy completely or mould it according to their needs. State governments will likely be pushed by the ministry to give cross-subsidy to data centres. Currently, the data centres receive electricity at very high rates or from other states they get electricity for a lower rate but has to pay cross-subsidy surcharge. An official said if the power cost can be managed then more players will be attracted into the system and hence can bring down the overall cost of running or managing the data centre easily.
Another official said, MeitY is likely to suggest that data centres be considered as part of the urban or semi-urban infrastructure to attract players from real estate to make investments in the sector. Currently, 40 clearances are needed to establish a data centre which is time-consuming and hence discussions are carried down to all stakeholders to look for single-window clearance for applicants.
To reduce the costs further some relief in the form of lower levies to electronic components may be given by the government and to favour domestic ancillary industries suitable guidelines will be given. Software policy group Nasscom suggested data centres to have dual power grid connections so that in case of a breakdown at least one power source will be in function.
