The Uttar Pradesh government is formulating policies for new age sectors like retail and data centres to attract private investment and accelerate economic growth.
The draft data centre policy is being given final touches and will soon be put before the state Cabinet for approval.
The state government had shortlisted this sector for inviting investments during the two-day UP Investors’ Summit in 2018.
With the help of the new policy, the state government is looking to make UP a major data centre destination in India, offering several sops to investors. This is expected to generate a large number of employment opportunities as well.
In January 2019, the Adani Group had signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Andhra Pradesh government to invest Rs 70,000 crore to develop a solar-powered data centre park in Visakhapatnam over the next 20 years.
“While the data centre policy will be placed before the Cabinet for approval later this month, a policy on retail trade is also being prepared,” said a senior official on Saturday.
By definition, a data centre refers to a place housing computing infrastructures like servers, routers, switches and firewalls, apart from supporting paraphernalia like back-up equipment, fire suppression facilities and air-conditioning.
The domestic data centre industry got a boost following Reserve Bank of India’s circular in April, 2018 for data localisation, asking all global and domestic players in financial market, banking, insurance, credit card, e-commerce companies, to store the data of their customers within India against the practice of storing the same in foreign territory.
In April last year, the RBI had asked payment firms to ensure that their data were stored exclusively on local servers, setting a tight six-month deadline for compliance. That deadline was said to have been missed by some foreign firms, including credit card giants Visa and MasterCard.
International giants usually store data on global servers and the requirement to store data locally would require them to make additional investment in India.
But policy makers in India believe that storing data locally would help monitor and conduct investigations, if the need arises.
E-commerce policy also requires exclusive local storage and processing of data generated by users like Amazon, Walmart, and Flipkart in India from various sources including e-commerce platforms, social media like WhatsApp and search engines.
Meanwhile, due to its large population and area, UP has emerged as a key growth market for e-commerce and retail majors, including Walmart and Amazon, who have been expanding their on-line and off-line presence in the state.
Besides, implementation of Goods and Services Tax (GST) in July 2017 created both opportunities and challenges for small traders by transforming the nature of their business operations.
In this backdrop, the new retail trade policy is aimed at protecting the interests of both traders and consumers in the state.
Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has directed officials to prepare policies by roping in representatives of the respective sectors and after taking suggestions from professionals and experts.
The growing e-commerce industry and the entry of global retailers has proliferated foreign investments in the domestic retail space. This has, however, not gone down well with small traders who see e-commerce as a potential threat to their business owing to a lack of level playing field.
Recently, Yogi Adityanath had exhorted traders and the business community to contribute towards making the state a trillion-dollar economy. This came close on heels of Prime Minister Narendra Modi announcing his plans to make India a $5-trillion economy by 2024.