Government clears Rs1,237 crore funding of state level IT infrastructure

Mumbai: The department of information technology (DIT) has approved the setting up of state data centres (SDC) in 27 states/UTs, involving a total outlay of Rs1,237 crore. Operations in 15 states are expected to start by June next year, a government press release said.

The department will have a share of Rs412 crore in the project, with the remaining Rs825 crore coming through additional central assistance.

The project aims to create a common secure IT infrastructure to host state level e-governance applications/data to enable seamless delivery of government-to-government (G2G), government-to-citizen (G2C) and government-to-business (G2B) services. These centres will be supported by wide area network (WAN) and common service centres (CSC) established at the village level, as part of e-governance project.

The current project will cover Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Chhatisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Orissa, Puducherry, Punjab, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Tripura, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar,Uttarakhand, Arunachal Pradesh & Mizoram, the release said.

An initial amount of Rs84.06 crore as DIT's share and Rs64.25 crore as ACA share has already been released to 23 states while another Rs12.50 crore is being released as DIT share to four more states - Bihar, Uttarakhand, Arunachal Pradesh & Mizoram. The remaining states/UTs, who have not submitted the proposals, are being requested to expedite the same, the release said.

Draft RFP received from the governments of Tripura, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Sikkim, Goa and Kerala are being examined by DIT. After formal approval of these RFPs, the centre expects the states to be in a position to release the RFPs by November 2008.

The central government approved the scheme for establishing data centres across 35 states/UTs across the country on 24 January 2008, with a total outlay of Rs1,623.20 crore towards the capital and operational expenses over a period of 5 years. The states/UTs have been categorised in three categories viz: large, medium and small.

It is expected that the data centres in about 12-15 states shall be set up and operationalised by end-June 2009. Data centres in the remaining states/UTs shall be progressively implemented from August 2009 onwards and the entire exercise is expected to be completed by December 2009/March 2010, considering a standard time for implementation of about 10 to 12 months.

Once established, state data centres would provide many functionalities, including central repository of the state, secure data storage, online delivery of services, citizen information/services portal, state intranet portal, remote management and service integration etc to enable seamless delivery of e-governance services in the states. The progress of implementation of data centre is currently being reviewed by the DIT with the states.

The data centres will host critical and sensitive government data whose ownership, strategic control and management/preservation of the data is being kept with the government. The data centres will have all the physical and logic security components necessary from information security perspective, and also will need to be ISO27001 certificated. Further, it is mandatory to carry out the security audit of the data centre by the states once in six months. The National Informatics Centre (NIC) would advise the states on security related framework to be put in place for SDC.

The data centres, which are proposed to be set up in all the states/UTs across the country, shall enable aggregation of IT infrastructure (hardware, storage, networking and software) and management resources and ensure better operations, standardisation of systems and management control, leading to faster deployment and reduced costs, offering dynamic scalability as their demand grows, including security related requirements and uptime of the highest order, the release added.