Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her Budget speech announced the plan to roll out a policy to aid private sector companies in setting up data centre parks across the country.
Most experts have given a thumbs up to the move because a strong IT infrastructure through 'data parks' is necessary to create an effective and integrated digital network. It will become the backbone of a robust digital economy, they told CNBC-TV18.
Currently, India is the world's second largest online market after China with nearly 600 million active internet users.
But, penetration is skewed towards urban centres making the proverbial "Bharat" a huge opportunity for internet led businesses.
Besides that, India’s growing data centre industry offers a $4 billion potential for developers by 2020, according to the experts.
The government's move to bring data centre parks policy is also significant as it comes at a time when India is pushing global technology companies like Google, WhatsApp, Facebook, TikTok etc. to store personal data of users locally.
In an interview to CNBC-TV18’s Shereen Bhan, Sachin Jaiswal, co-founder and CEO of niki.ai, Swapan Rajdev, co-founder and CTO of Haptik, and Manish Singhal, founding partner of Pi Ventures on Thursday discussed whether India has the capacity to create and consume this infrastructure and what will it take to drive investments into these mega data centre parks.
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