Mumbai: IT industry lobby group Nasscom<\/a> has urged the government to not restrict data centre fiscal incentives<\/a> to investments made only in the proposed ‘Data Centre Economic Zones<\/a>’. It also said the incentives must not be tied to any other location-based criteria. The Ministry of Electronics<\/a> and IT (MeitY) last month released a draft Data Centre Policy<\/a> and invited comments from the industry and public on the same.
According to the policy, “A Data Centre<\/a> Incentivization Scheme (DCIS) will be formulated by Government of India which would specify the intended beneficiaries, applicability criteria and fiscal and non-fiscal incentives for the sector.”
Nasscom<\/a> said while incentives would make such services globally competitive, the policy lacked clarity on what the applicability criteria would be for such incentives.
Sunil Gupta, cofounder and CEO of data centre<\/a> infrastructure company Yotta Infrastructure<\/a> said the proposed incentives should be linked to the adoption of certain standards proposed by the government. He said the government should mandate certain minimum standards instead of leaving it to the operators to define their own standards.
“This will allow adoption of transparent practices in terms of design, commissioning, and operations of data centres and hence, create a very high benchmark for the Indian data centre industry,” Gupta said.
The fiscal incentives should be linked to the adoption of standards and highest performance including the lowest PUE (power usage effectiveness), highest quality standards, scalability, and adoption of green energy, he added.
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