The Union Budget 2020 has proposed to provide a big push to technology and digital connectivity in India. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has announced that the government will be setting up Data Centre Parks in India, which will push digital connectivity as well as further investment in BharatNet. The government has also proposed to allocate Rs 8000 crore over the next 5 years for quantum technology related computing.
“I propose to set up Data Centre Parks. The IT sector should also look into this. This will help is storing and dissemination of data better,” said Sitharaman. The Finance Minister also said that India has embraced sharing economy with aggregators, displacing regular businesses. She emphasised that Analytics, IoT and AI are changing the way the world economies work, and India needs to focus on the same.
The government proposes to have a policy to build data centre parks throughout the country. The Union Budget 2020 also proposes that all public institutions at Gram Panchayat levels will be provided with digital connectivity. “All public institutions at the gram panchayat level will all be given digital connectivity and Fiber to home will link 1 lakh gram panchayats,” said Sitharaman. This is a big push to the Digital India initiative. The fibre to home internet connectivity through the BharatNet scheme will link as many as 100,000 Gram Panchayats in the next financial year. The Government is allocating Rs 6,000 crore for the expansion of BharatNet.
Towards the end of last year, there was significant movement in India around Data Centre Parks. In July, the Adani group had said that it would invest as much as Rs 70,000 crore to set up solar powered data parks in Andhra Pradesh. Real estate giant Hiranandani Group announced that they have a Rs 14,000 crore investment plan for Data Centre Parks in India. Oracle also announced the launch of its Gen 2 Cloud region in Mumbai, and there is another one planned for Hyderabad.
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