Govt to launch data centre policy soon, may suggest single-window clearance

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is likely to come out with a national policy framework for establishing data centres across the country, which the states will be free to either follow in total or mould slightly to suit their needs, senior government officials said.

Among the major policy introductions in the new data centre policy framework, the MeitY is likely to push for usage of renewable energy such as solar energy for day-to-day operations of the building which will house the data disks, an official said. “Data centres consume a lot of power and there is little to no cross-subsidy available to them. So apart from the data consumed by data trays or data racks, we want to push for renewable energy consumption for other needs of the building in which the data centre is housed,” a senior official said.