PIB Tracker1.57 GW of data centres and a sovereign-cloud push
A PIB backgrounder for ESTIC 2026 set out India's cloud ecosystem - 30 empanelled providers, MeghRaj serving 2,330 departments, 1.57 GW of data centres heading for 8 GW - and the policy turn towards keeping sensitive data on Indian infrastructure; an overview, not a new policy.
What happened
- A PIB backgrounder released during ESTIC 2026 set out India's cloud ecosystem: 1,092.79 million internet subscribers (March 2026), 25.51 GB of wireless data per subscriber a month and 285,376 PB of wireless traffic in FY 2025-26.
- 30 Cloud Service Providers are empanelled (September 2026), with infrastructure in Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Delhi-NCR and Jamnagar; MeghRaj (2014) and MeghRaj 2.0 serve 2,330 departments.
- Data centre capacity is 1.57 GW (August 2026), projected near 8 GW by 2030, with about US$70 billion invested and US$90 billion announced; NIC runs 4 National and 24 Mini Data Centres.
- The IndiaAI Mission (Rs 10,371.92 crore) has onboarded 45,000+ GPUs; BHASHINI moved to an Indian cloud run by Yotta in February 2026, reporting up to 40 per cent better performance and 20-30 per cent savings.
- Governance: MeitY's Cloud Selection Framework (March 2026) classifies government data by sensitivity and prioritises NIC and State data centres; the DPDP Act, 2023 regulates cross-border transfer; NeGD appraises e-governance architecture.
For Prelims
- Cloud deployment models: a public cloud runs on a third party's infrastructure shared among customers; a private cloud is dedicated to one organisation; a hybrid cloud combines the two - the backgrounder's example is a municipal tax portal on public cloud with citizens' records on a private one.
- Service models: IaaS rents servers, storage and networks; PaaS gives developers a platform to build and test applications; SaaS delivers ready software over the internet; serverless computing runs tasks without the user managing servers - which still exist, run by the provider.
- MeghRaj: the Government of India's cloud initiative, launched by MeitY in 2014 to speed e-governance and cut ICT spending; MeghRaj 2.0 offers IaaS, PaaS and SaaS on a distributed architecture and now serves 2,330 departments, including DigiLocker, MyGov and the National Scholarship Portal.
- Data centres: capacity is measured in power drawn - 1.57 GW in August 2026, projected near 8 GW by 2030. Hubs: Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Delhi-NCR, Jamnagar; emerging in Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal.
- IndiaAI Mission: approved by the Cabinet on 7 March 2024 with Rs 10,371.92 crore; its common compute facility has onboarded more than 45,000 GPUs, offered to start-ups and academia at affordable rates so they need not buy their own hardware.
- DPDP Act, 2023 and transfers: Section 16 follows a negative-list approach - personal data may go abroad except to countries the Centre notifies as restricted. The DPDP Rules were notified on 13 November 2025, with obligations phased in; sectoral rules such as RBI's payment-data localisation still apply.
- Data sovereignty: keeping data, models and processing under Indian jurisdiction. BHASHINI's move to Yotta's Indian cloud keeps language datasets, AI models and citizen interactions in India; during Maha Kumbh 2025 it ran real-time translation in more than 11 Indian languages.
- Skills base: FutureSkills PRIME (MeitY-NASSCOM, 2021) had 34 lakh registered candidates by August 2026; NIELIT runs 56 centres and 750 affiliated institutes; a 2026 CNCF report counts 2.25 million cloud-native developers in India, 44 per cent using hybrid cloud.
For UPSC: MeghRaj (2014): 2,330 departments; 30 empanelled CSPs; data centres 1.57 GW (to ~8 GW by 2030); IndiaAI Mission Rs 10,371.92 crore, 45,000+ GPUs; Cloud Selection Framework March 2026.
What it is NOT: A backgrounder describes, it does not decide: no new scheme, money or rule is announced. It does not say how much government data still sits on foreign-owned clouds, what share of the 1.57 GW is owned by foreign hyperscalers, or how much electricity and water an 8 GW data centre base would need. The negative list under Section 16 of the DPDP Act has not been notified, so the cross-border rule it cites is not yet operative, and the BHASHINI performance gains are reported, not independently audited.
For Mains
Syllabus: GS3.13 · GS3.12 · Linkage L1
Anchor
Every digital public service - DigiLocker, UPI records, AI models - runs on someone's servers. The backgrounder's argument is that a country producing data at India's scale needs computing it controls, which is why cloud has become a question of sovereignty as well as efficiency.
Substantiation (data)
1,092.79 million internet subscribers; 285,376 PB of wireless data in FY 2025-26; 30 empanelled providers; MeghRaj serving 2,330 departments; 1.57 GW of data centres, projected near 8 GW by 2030; 45,000-plus GPUs under the Rs 10,371.92 crore IndiaAI Mission.
Position
A layered approach is right: sensitive data on NIC and State data centres, the rest on empanelled commercial clouds, governed by the Cloud Selection Framework and the DPDP Act. Sovereignty and efficiency need not conflict if classification is done well.
Counterpoint
Domestic hosting is not domestic technology: much of the stack, chips and software remains foreign, and foreign hyperscalers are among the empanelled providers. Data centres are also heavy users of power and water, which the backgrounder does not address.
Way forward
Notify the DPDP negative list and data-classification rules; publish how much government data has migrated to sovereign clouds; tie data-centre growth to renewable power and water-efficient cooling; and build indigenous software layers alongside physical capacity.
Conclusion
India has the demand, the investment and the frameworks for a domestic cloud. The harder part is making sovereignty mean control over the technology, not only over the building where the servers sit.
Deploys into: Data sovereignty and digital public infrastructure · Data protection and cross-border data flows · AI compute and data centres · Energy demand of digital infrastructure
PIB Backgrounder · 2026-10-29 · PRID 2329978 · PIB source ↗