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NITI Aayog's Frontier Tech Hub Releases Data Centre Evaluation Framework for States

17 October 2026National

NITI Aayog's Frontier Tech Hub has released a Data Centre Evaluation Framework to help States appraise data-centre proposals and gauge their own infrastructure readiness, so capacity is added sustainably rather than wherever land and power are merely cheapest. It rests on five pillars: Power and Energy; Water and Cooling; Environmental Protection; Economic Value Creation; and Policy, Governance and Implementation. India's installed data-centre capacity has grown from about 375 MW in 2020 to 1.5 GW in 2026. The Frontier Tech Hub, set up in March 2025 under Programme Director Yugal Kishore Joshi, follows State-level moves such as Maharashtra's green data-centre park.

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NITI Aayog (National Institution for Transforming India) replaced the Planning Commission on 1 January 2015; the Prime Minister is its ex-officio Chairperson | India's data governance rests on the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 | One gigawatt (GW) equals 1,000 megawatts (MW)

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