A Rs 350-crore state-of-art National Data Centre is set to be established in the Amingaon region of Assam and will be catering to the entire north-eastern region. Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal will soon perform the Bhoomi Pooja of the centre to be established by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) at the outskirts of Guwahati within a period of 31 months.
Sonowal, in 2018, had proposed the establishment of such a facility for the north-east region. Following the acceptance of the proposal, he had also allotted 43,200 sqft of prime land for it, the report said.
According to the reports, the required funds for the project will be provided by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India. The estimated cost for the data centre includes 3 years of operational support.
Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union Minister of Law and Justice, Communications, and Electronics and Information Technology and Sanjay Dhotre, Minister of State for Education, Communications, and Electronics and Information Technology, along with CM Sarbananada Sonowal, Finance Minister Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma, and IT Minister Keshab Mahanta are expected to participate in the Bhoomi Pooja on the occasion of initiating work for setting up the first National Data Centre for the North Eastern Region (NDC-NER).
The NDC-NER will impart the much-needed momentum in terms of digital infrastructure to the North-east to live up to the Prime Minister's expectations expressed in the ‘Digital North Eastern India– Vision 2022' conclave held in Guwahati in 2018, and attended by all the Chief Ministers of the 8 north-eastern states, claimed the report.
It further stated that the National Data Centre will act as a Disaster Recovery (DR) site for applications hosted in other NIC data centres in the country. NDC-NER, with its cutting-edge ICT cloud platform and data repository, comes as a great digital boon for the eight north-eastern states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura.
