Digital Sovereignty: How India is building its own cloud ecosystem to keep critical data within national borders

In 2,330 government departments now run their digital services on MeghRaj, the Government of India’s own cloud, and the country’s data centre capacity has climbed to 1.57 GW. Together with 30 empanelled cloud service providers and a policy framework that decides which data may sit where, these numbers describe a quiet but decisive shift: India is building the infrastructure to keep its most sensitive data under its own jurisdiction. The Union Government set out the state of this ecosystem in a detailed note released on 29 October 2026, as the second edition of the Emerging Science, Technology and Innovation Conclave (ESTIC-2026) concluded at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi. Organised by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research under the theme “Creative Minds, Catalyzing Science, Empowering Technologies”, the three-day conclave placed cloud computing among the emerging frontiers central to the vision of Viksit Bharat 2047. A nation generating data at scale The case for a domestic cloud begins with sheer volume. India’s internet subscriber base reached 1,092.79 million in March 2026. The average wireless user now consumes 25.51 GB of data every month, and total wireless data usage touched 285,376 petabytes in 2025-26. Behind those figures lies an economy that runs increasingly on digital records. Every UPI payment leaves a transaction trail, every online certificate creates a government record, and every artificial intelligence application both consumes and produces information in enormous quantities. Storing the data is only part of the challenge. It must also be processed, secured and served back to citizens without interruption. Cloud computing answers this need by delivering storage, servers, software and processing power over the internet, on demand. A government department no longer has to buy, house and maintain its own servers to host an application. It can draw on shared infrastructure and pay only for what it uses. The same flexibility lets an examination portal scale up during registration season and scale down afterwards, or a hospital restore patient records after an equipment failure. But convenience brings a question that every nation now faces. When public data lives on someone else’s servers, who controls it? A domestic cloud, backed by clear rules and strong security, keeps that control at home. It also underpins reliable public services, AI development and the larger goal of Aatmanirbharta in technology. MeghRaj: The government’s own cloud MeghRaj, the GI Cloud initiative of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), was launched in 2014 to speed up e-governance and make better use of public spending on information technology. Its second-generation version, MeghRaj 2.0, now serves as the secure digital backbone of the Digital India mission. Through a distributed architecture, it offers government departments infrastructure, platforms and ready-to-use software as services, allowing them to deploy applications quickly and on demand. Adoption has grown steadily. In December 2025, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Jitin Prasada told the Rajya Sabha that 2,170 ministries and departments had hosted cloud-based applications on MeghRaj. By September 2026, that number had risen to 2,330. Few of the country used public platforms run on this infrastructure, including DigiLocker, MyGov, the National Scholarship Portal and the Department of Posts Advanced Postal Technology system. MeghRaj 2.0 has also been positioned as AI-ready, capable of hosting the computing workloads that the next generation of public services will demand. Thirty providers, Indian and global As of September 2026, MeitY has empanelled 30 cloud service providers, with infrastructure spread across Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Delhi-NCR and Jamnagar among other locations. Indian names feature prominently on the list. They include Jio Platforms, Tata Consultancy Services, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), ITI Limited, RailTel Corporation of India, AdaniConneX and Yotta Data Services. Global hyperscalers such as Google Cloud, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services are also empanelled through their Indian subsidiaries. The mix gives departments a wide choice while keeping every provider within a common framework of standards, security audits and Indian oversight. The presence of public sector players such as BSNL, ITI and RailTel also ensures that the state retains its own capacity rather than depending entirely on private operators. Data centres: The physical backbone Every cloud ultimately rests on buildings full of servers, and India is building them rapidly. Data centre capacity reached 1.57 GW in August 2026, up from about 1,280 MW reported in Parliament in December 2025. It is projected to grow to nearly 8 GW by 2030. The established hubs remain Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Delhi-NCR and Jamnagar. New clusters are emerging in Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal, spreading digital infrastructure and jobs beyond the traditional metros. The capital flowing in is substantial. Around USD 70 billion of investment is already underway in the sector, with a further USD 90 billion in announced projects. Major global commitments include Google’s announced USD 15 billion AI hub in Visakhapatnam and a USD 8.3 billion data centre investment by Amazon Web Services in Maharashtra. The state has its own network as well. The National Informatics Centre (NIC) operates four National Data Centres and 24 Mini Data Centres across the country, offering shared hosting, co-location and cloud services to government departments. The mini data centres at NIC State Centres serve state-level e-governance needs through infrastructure that is decentralised but built to common standards. BHASHINI: Sovereignty in practice The example of what a domestic cloud can deliver is BHASHINI, the Digital India platform for Indian language translation. In February 2026, MeitY reported that BHASHINI had migrated to an Indian cloud operated by Yotta Data Services. The move means that its language datasets, AI models and citizen interactions now remain entirely within India’s jurisdiction. The results, by the Government’s account, have been encouraging. The deployment has reportedly delivered up to 40 per cent better performance, cost savings of 20 to 30 per cent, and 99.99 per cent uptime. BHASHINI had already shown its value at scale during Maha Kumbh 2025, when it provided real-time translation and voice-based assistance in more than 11 Indian languages, helping pilgrims find information […]