National Data Centre to be established soon at Amingaon

GUWAHATI: A major initiative for the establishment of a data centre catering to the entire north-eastern region taken up and led by the Chief Minister SarbanandaSonowal is soon to be practically realized with the performance of Bhoomi Pooja for a Rs 350-crore state-of-art National Data Centre to be established by the National Informatics Centre in Amingaon at the outskirts of Guwahati within a period of 31 months.

The Chief Minister had proposed the establishment of such a facility for the Northeast in 2018, and on acceptance of the proposal had magnanimously allotted 43,200 sqft of prime land for it. The required funds for the project will be provided by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India. The estimated cost for the data centre includes three years of operational support.

Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union Minister of Law & Justice, Communications and Electronics & Information Technology and Sanjay Dhotre, Minister of State for Education, Communications and Electronics & Information Technology along with CM SarbananadaSonowal, Finance Minister Dr. HimantaBiswaSarma, and IT Minister KeshabMahanta are expected to participate in the BhoomiPooja on the occasion of initiating work for setting up the first National Data Centre for the North Eastern Region (NDC-NER).

The NDC-NER will impart the much-needed momentum in terms of digital infrastructure to the North-east to live up to the Prime Minister's expectations expressed in the 'Digital North Eastern India– Vision 2022' conclave held in Guwahati in 2018, and attended by all the Chief Ministers of the eight north-eastern States.

With the increasing preference for cloud-based online applications, it will go a long way in making the Northeast an integral part of the Digital India growth story by providing the Region with its own cloud platform to further and fast track its development initiatives. A digital infrastructure of its nature and scope is expected to be a 'core utility' to enable the delivery of services in an efficient and inclusive manner to every citizen. Such a facility has a huge potential for technology skill development and employment. Additionally, the National Data Centre will act as a Disaster Recovery (DR) site for applications hosted in other NIC data centres in the Country.

The NDC-NER with its cutting-edge ICT cloud platform and data repository comes as a great digital boon for the eight north-eastern states of Arunachal, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura. Besides serving as the hub for all digital initiatives of the North Eastern states, it will provide the required impetus for increase in use of e-governance services, geo-spatial applications and development related activities. In addition, there will be confidentiality and strategic control of data as well.

The NDC-NER with a scalable capacity of more than 200 server racks, it will provide the Northeast the ability to leverage high-end connectivity, on-demand cloud infrastructure and secure data hosting, processing and data management, stated a release.

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