Govt plans largest Nat'l data centre in Bhopal

New Delhi: In a major move aimed at securing the data of the country, the government has mulled to set up India's largest National data centre in Bhopal apart from the plan to expand its BPO promotion scheme to one lakh seats.

"As many as 59.15 crore Indians have linked 87.79 crore bank accounts with the biometric identifier Aadhaar," Union IT & Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said while addressing mediapersons during a Press conference organised to highlight the achievements of his ministry the last four years.

Nearly Rs 4 lakh crore has been disbursed as direct benefit transfer to poor people which has led to savings of Rs 90,000 crore by removing fictitious beneficiaries in the last four years.

While spelling out the achievements of his ministry, Prasad said that the BPO movement will be expanded to one lakh seats from current 48,000 seats. The fifth National Data Centre will come up in Bhopal with a capacity of five lakh virtual servers, he added.

Notably, the government had recently launched its fourth data centre in Bhubaneshwar, which was aimed at addressing the increased load from various new digital projects.

The National Informatics Center (NIC), which is the technology backbone of the government, has already existing data centres in New Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune, which are already reached 75-80 per cent of their capacity.

Prasad further said that relevance of Aadhaar has been established by the acceptance of the unique identity by the people as a total number of 121.46 crore Aadhaar has been generated till June 16.

"When the NDA government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power, just 61 crore Aadhaar were generated, which has now reached 121.46 crore mark," Prasad said.

Spelling about the achievements of is ministry, Prasad said, "The growth in mobile phone manufacturing had increased substantially in India. There were around 120 mobile phones and accessories manufacturing units in India as of 2017-18. Total handsets manufactured every year was 22.5 crore with a value of Rs 1.32 lakh crore during the same period."

While talking about Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance (UMANG) app, the minister said the app had seen over 64 lakh downloads so far.

UMANG is government's all-in-one single unified multi-channel, multi-platform and multi-service freeware mobile app for accessing over thousand central and state government services in multiple Indian languages over Android, iOS, Windows.