NPCI to build a data centre in Chennai

Digital payment and settlement systems body National Payments Council of India (NPCI) is setting up its own national data centre in Chennai.

The facility will be a tier-IV data centre, a statement from NPCI said. Data centres are ranked between I to IV, depending on their complexity. A tier IV data centre is the most efficient and includes high quality of cooling and power infrastructure.

The foundation stone for the data centre was laid by Tamil Nadu chief minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami on May 19, according to media reports. Engineering major Larsen & Toubro is constructing the facility.

NPCI’s data centre will mainly host services under the digital India initiatives, the government's flagship programme to digitise several social and economic schemes. 

According to NPCI, the data centre will be built with an Internet of Things based building management system with an eight-layer security system. The building will be environment friendly with the adoption of green building features, rainwater harvesting and solar panels. 

"Our focus will always remain on enhancing acceptance infrastructure for digital payments so as to encourage customers towards digital transactions to achieve Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and government's less cash objective," N Rajendran, CTO of NPCI said.

Founded in 2008, the NPCI is an umbrella organisation to operate retail payments and settlement systems. Its other offerings include RuPay Card, Immediate Payment Service (IMPS), Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM), BHIM Aadhaar, National Electronic Toll Collection (NETC) and Bharat BillPay.

Unified payments interface (UPI), developed by NPCI,  has emerged as one of the most favoured modes of online payments, with a billion transactions almost every month in the recent past.  

After the recent digital payments outage triggered by RBI-imposed restrictions on financially stressed Yes Bank, NPCI had asked UPI fintechs to adopt a multi-partner approach to avoid recurrence of such events.

National Informatics Centre (NIC) has set up national data centres at Delhi, Pune, Hyderabad and Bhubaneswar and 30 small data centres at various state capitals to provide services to the government.