Shri Arvind Kumar Choudhary, Special Secretary (IT), Government of Bihar
In a new development, the Bihar Government has intensified its focus on inviting IT companies to set up their datacenters in the state. With the introduction of the Bihar IT Policy 2024 a fortnight ago, which carries unprecedented levels of financial incentives and waivers for IT companies investing in the state, the Nitish Kumar Government has aggressively been soliciting datacenter operators and cloud service providers to set up their respective facilities in the state.
In an interaction with Digital Edge at the Convergence India Expo 2024 held in New Delhi, Shri Arvind Kumar Choudhary, Special Secretary (IT), Government of Bihar, said, “The IT Policy 2024 recently released by the Bihar Government sheds a huge focus on datacenters because they’re the locomotives of any meaningful and sustainable automation drives underway across sectors and verticals.”
“Bihar has witnessed large scale adoption of automation in running and managing her governance. Across ministries and government departments, IT tools and applications are being made use of. However, private sector too has started relying on automation. So, the market is quite rife for datacenter operators and cloud service providers in Bihar as software application workloads cutting across verticals have steadily been rising,” elaborated Shri Choudhary.
“The geographical location of Bihar is quite attractive. Having neighbours like Uttar Pradesh (UP), West Bengal (WB) and Jharkhand, our state is also the gateway to the North-Eastern states of India. Not only that, Bihar has got neighbouring countries like Nepal and Bhutan in the north and Bangladesh in the east. So, along with the domestic market existing in Bihar, neigbouring states and countries bring in abundant of business opportunities to datacenter and cloud service providers having their operations in the state,” explained he.
Shri Arvind Kumar Choudhary, Special Secretary (IT), Government of Bihar, along with his team members at the Convergence India Expo 2024 held at New Delhi’s Pragati Maidan
While the financial incentives assured in the Bihar IT Policy 2024 is applicable across the technological and operational spectrums, datacenter service providers can get rather maximum benefits out of the offered subsidy and reimbursement schemes. For instance, on fixed capital investments up to Rs 100 Crore, the Government would reimburse 30 percent of the amount incurred by the tech firm. If they get term-loans from RBI registered banking or non-banking financial institutions, 10 percent interest subvention subsidy would be provided on the amount availed of. Similarly, 25 percent of annual electricity bills will also be reimbursed by the Bihar Government. Also, the IT Policy offers employment generation related subsidies to companies establishing their bases in the state by contributing Rs 5,000 per month towards every employee’s EPF (employees’ provident fund).
“As datacenters are capital-intensive industry, our IT Policy is quite suitable to operate them sustainably in Bihar. So, be it fixed capita investments or recurring costs like electricity bills or employees welfare commitments, our new Policy is full of governmental altruism and support,” said Shri Choudhary. “On electricity consumption extent by datacenters, I give you a perspective. In Bihar, we run our own 2.6 mWh datacenter, which is reasonably big. However, larger datacenters consume even higher quantum of energy. But then, here is our new IT Policy that offers electricity bill reimbursements to datacenter entities by 25 percent,” added he.
Bihar looks to be an attractive destination for datacenter operators and cloud service providers for setting up their units in the state. “We’ll provide every facility and support to them if they come and establish their datacenters in the state. If they plan to invest more than Rs 100 Crore in building and running their datacenter operations, we would provide them with tailor-made ‘special’ packages,” said Shri Choudhary.
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