NIC is yet to pick the winners of National Government Cloud bid

Six months after floating a tender, the National Informatics Centre (NIC) is still evaluating bids for managing the National Government Cloud. The validity of the bids expires next month and industry executives expect a rebid.

A cloud service provider empanelled with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) told ET, "The tender says the bid has a six-month validity period. It has already been six months. It may not have been a successful request for proposal. It may come up for a rebid, there is no information".

A top NIC official, however, in response to ET's queries on the number and names of companies who had applied for the same said, "The above tender is currently under evaluation. The process is going on."


A recent statement by the IT MoS Rajeev Chandrasekhar brought the limelight back on the National Government Cloud when he said the cloud infrastructure business is currently being dominated by three companies: Microsoft Azure, Amazon and Google, and to counter its dominance a secure government cloud will be set up via a public private partnership (PPP) where a private company will be selected via a tender.

Another top official from a cloud service provider empanelled with MeitY told ET, "This kind of an RFP (request for proposal) is appropriate for system integrators like Wipro or Accenture. Consulting firms like PwC or KPMG, who can provide programme management services will also be the right fit."

PwC, KPMG, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Wipro, Accenture and TCS either refused to comment owing to the silent period or did not respond.

Need for government cloud

Explaining the need for a government cloud, the NIC Services Incorporated (NICSI) said in the tender document, "Misuse of sensitive data such as, government and defence-related data has led to work on solutions for data localisation."

This comes at a time when the government is drafting the Digital Data Protection Bill, 2022, where it intends to allow cross border data flow by default to all countries except those on a blacklist, ET had reported this on March 21.

"The first steps towards data localisation for the government is to store all data being generated by various central government, state government and public sector undertaking agencies within India. The government needs a network of hyperscale data centres to efficiently store and manage the data being generated on government and semi government platforms," the NICSI further said.

India's average data consumption per user per month increased from 0.8 GB in 2015 to 17 GB in 2022, as per the NICSI.

The NICSI had floated a tender for selection of an infrastructure engineering and design agency. This is for the management of hyperscale data centre campuses at various locations in India with approximately 200 MW capacity. This will enable the government to build a national government cloud via a public private partnership.

NIC will be the technical partner and NICSI the nodal implementation agency for execution of the project over a span of 10 years. The programme management agency is required to prepare a detailed project report for a National Government Cloud. Once the report is approved, an international bidding process will be initiated to select a PPP partner.

As per the tender document, the RFP was published on October 17 and the due date for the bid submission was November 15 last year. The bids have a validity of six months starting from the due date. The bids expire next month.