India won’t compromise on data sovereignty, says IT minister

India is an ‘important digital power’ and will not compromise on its data sovereignty, IT and Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said on July 7 at the launch of Yotta Infrastructure, a Hiranandani Group subsidiary and a managed data centre service provider, that is developing hyper-scale data centre parks in India.

“We shall never compromise on our data sovereignty. India being an important digital power, our data sovereignty will be very important. We shall ensure that we are never made to compromise, nor we will do that (compromise),” Prasad said, speaking at the launch of the data centre.

Dubbed as the largest in Asia, the Rs 1,100 crore data centre, built by Hiranandani Group company Yotta, was inaugurated by Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray at a virtual ceremony on July 7.Given its proximity to Mumbai and Pune, Yotta NM1 Data Centre is located in the 600-acre Hiranandani Fortune City in Panvel. Yotta NM1 is first of the five data centre buildings coming up at this Integrated Yotta Data Centre Park, which, once fully built, will have an overall capacity of 30,000 racks and 250 MW power.

Spread across 820,000 sq ft and having 7,200 racks and a power consumption requirement of 50 MW, the first DC Yotta NM1 offers a highly scalable data centre infrastructure, capable of hosting global cloud, content and OTT operators besides the mission-critical applications of enterprises and governments.

The ultramodern building, supported by a highly redundant on-site power infrastructure, will soon be powered by its own captive solar power plant and an on-site captive gas-based co-gen power plant, thus delivering its hosted customers long term reliable, green and cost-effective source of power.

Niranjan Hiranandani, co-founder and Managing Director of the Hiranandani Group, said demand for hyper-scale data centres is on the rise, thanks to the government’s push for the national e-commerce policy and proposed policy on data centre parks.

The firm was planning to inaugurate the facility by March end, but the same was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

-MoneyControl