RailTel Corporation of India Limited, a central public sector unit under the country's Ministry of Railways, has again seen recognition of its strength in the telecoms infrastructure space, this time through an order from the Madhya Pradesh government for expansion of the State Data Centre (SDC) and establishment of a disaster recovery (DR) centre.
The order is valued at RS. 115 crore, including taxes (about US$14.9 million), and was won through an open, competitive bidding process.
The SDC is described as the “shared, reliable and secure infrastructure services centre for hosting and managing the e-governance applications of state and its constituent departments/organization”.
It is intended to provide such functionalities as a central repository for the state, secure data storage, online delivery of services, a citizen information and services portal, a state intranet portal, disaster recovery, remote management and service integration.
RailTel says that more citizen-centric schemes involving e-governance applications will be available to citizens of Madhya Pradesh after the project is completed.
RailTel is one of the largest neutral telecom infrastructure providers in the country owning a Pan-India optic fibre network and two Tier III data centres. It’s also been in the news a lot lately. We reported in January, for example, that RailTel had plans to work with a number of partners to create edge data centres at railway premises across 102 locations in India.
In addition, last year RailTel Corporation and the state-run telecom research and development organisation Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DoT) agreed to work together on the modernisation and expansion of communication networks across the country.
It’s no wonder perhaps that Shri Puneet Chawla, CMD, RailTel, said of the recent contract: "With this, RailTel is well-positioned to win other state data centre projects as well.”
