The Hon’ble Minister of Communications & IT, Shri Kapil Sibal, inaugurated National Data Centre and launched the Dial.Gov services in the presence of Hon’ble Minister of State for Communications & IT, Shri Milind Deora and Hon’ble Minister of State for Communications & IT, Dr.(Smt.) Kruparani Killi on 17th December 2012 at Data Centre, Shashtri Park. The National Data Centre inaugurated, is one of the largest Data Centres spread over 60,000 square feet, with a capacity to host 480 server racks to host a large number of physical servers. The cloud services provided from this Data Centre including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), will enable application providers to quickly develop applications using standard stacks and deploy them on pre-configured platform on demand, thus bringing down the total turnaround time for an eGovernance service. The Dial.Gov Service, which was launched on the very day, is a step in the direction of inclusive Governance, where citizen is empowered by information regarding his eligibility on Government benefits from various schemes. Often the true beneficiaries of these schemes do not have access to the necessary information and hence are deprived. At present, the Dial.Gov service has been set up with a Web Portal and Call Centre support with information on scholarship schemes of Ministries of HRD, Social Justice and Empowerment, Tribal Affairs, Minority Affairs and S&T and that of various State Governments. Dial.Gov service will evolve to include information on other welfare services provided by the Government of India such as Pensions, Farmer/ Agriculture related benefits, welfare schemes for BPL category, etc. A state-of-art Software Development Centre has been set up with facilities for development of large e-Governance projects for various Ministries and Departments such as Panchayati Raj, Transport, IVFRT, Counselling, UPSC, e-Office. It is spread over 30,000 sq ft of area with 375 seats for developers. Speaking during the inauguration, Minister of Communications & IT, Shri Kapil Sibal, said that the Data Centre will act as a vehicle to provide information and data which is needed to serve our consumers who are the recipients of various Central Government services and scholarships. “When you really imagine connectivity to the level of Panchayat, we see an exponential increase and the complexity of dealing with data, as large as that, and then being through that data to be able to deliver services to the common man” Shri Sibal said.