समाचार Samāchār · Business · 26 October 2026

RBI opens a second data centre in Odisha to keep India’s payments running

Prime Minister Modi opened the RBI’s ₹169 crore data centre and cybersecurity institute near Bhubaneswar on Sunday. It will host mission-critical payment and settlement systems.

India’s payment systems now have a second home. On Sunday Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened the Reserve Bank of India’s data centre and Cybersecurity Training Institute at Info Valley-II in Jatni, near Bhubaneswar. The project cost ₹169 crore. The data centre will host the RBI’s mission-critical payment and settlement systems. Odisha Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi said it is the second such facility after Navi Mumbai.

The site was chosen with care. It covers 18.55 acres and sits away from seismic zones and high-risk border areas. Then Governor Shaktikanta Das laid the foundation stone on 22 March 2023. Governor Sanjay Malhotra and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman attended the opening. The institute will train and research in cybersecurity, enterprise computing and emerging fields such as AI and quantum computing.

The Prime Minister framed the facility as security. He said wars today are not fought with weapons alone. He set out what the system now carries: nearly 60 crore Jan Dhan accounts, 13 crore first-time entrepreneurs under Mudra and 9 crore citizens under the Atal Pension Yojana.

This is the right kind of build. India’s digital public infrastructure is a model for the world. A model needs redundancy behind it. Two data centres far apart mean a payment rail that can ride out a flood, a quake or an attack. The institute matters as much as the building. Every bank, fintech and NBFC needs people who can defend systems at population scale. India should train them at home and then export the skill.

What a founder takes from it: Resilience is now part of the rails. Founders building on UPI and bank APIs should expect tighter cyber standards and treat them as a feature, not a cost.