The Digital India initiative, which is a scheme implemented by the Indian Government, has earmarked the country’s capital city of New Delhi as a key data center destination in its nationwide push for technological advancement. In doing so, the government will provide a timely boost to the city’s tech startups and budding e-commerce market by attracting more investment from both domestic and international data center service providers.
Following the Indian government’s recent adoption of colocation services across the country, the New Delhi data center market has been developing rapidly in spite of rising land costs and unreliable power supply. Factors that are fueling this trend include the growth of the financial services industry in major Indian cities, as well as the emergence of ever-evolving cloud computing and managed hosting sectors.
All over India, the government’s adoption of outsourced IT services has accelerated the development of the country’s data center market, while providing a substantial and consistent source of revenue for its top providers.
Although the Indian government has traditionally not outsourced much of its IT requirements, earlier this year, the Ministry of Electronics and IT published a list of colocation and cloud providers pre-approved for government contracts. Governmental departments that have shifted workloads to the cloud in recent times include the Department of Post, the Ministry of Human Resource Development and the Ministry of Law and Justice.
Launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015, the Digital India initiative was created for the purpose of empowering the country technologically by improving IT infrastructure and penetration and by ensuring that government services are made available to citizens electronically.