India’s central government today came out with its annual budget speech, and the budget had big, detailed focus towards usage of tech in coming out of the economic slowdown that the country finds itself in.
To start with, the Government announced that its ambitious BharatNet project, which aims to link the entire of India through a common optical fibre network, will go into 100K more villages within this year itself. The project, the largest of its kind globally, has already seen some success, and the government aims to continue expanding the same.
Next up was an announcement of ‘data center parks’. Data has a been big debating point among foreign tech companies and the Indian Government as the latter looks to enforce laws to locally store data. The Government today announced measures on how it plans to achieve the same, with data center parks across the country. Not just that, India is looking to become the global hub for data center storage and hence these data center parks will receive some level of funding directly from the Government. It is also planned to include private sector into building these parks. Specifics however, are awaited.
The Government also announced an important, to-be-launched Quantum computing scheme. While once again, specifics were not revealed, the finance minister announced an over $1 billion plus investment over a period of five years, to develop quantum computing facilities across the nation.
It is important to know though, that these announcements require much more details and specifics before anything can be made out of it. Secondly, India’s annual budget speeches are known to have big bang announcements coming in from the government, but only a few of those actually get implemented.
More to follow…
