New Delhi, December 7 2013: The Government of India has embarked  on an ambitious initiative – “GI Cloud”  or ‘Meghraj’  -- to evolve a strategy and implement various components including governance mechanisms to ensure   harnessing of the Cloud in governance.  
A Task Force was constituted by the  Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeiTY) under the chairmanship of  the Additional Secretary (eGov) to bring out the strategic direction and implementation roadmap of GI Cloud leveraging the existing or new infrastructure.

Two reports have been prepared by DeitY:

GI Cloud Strategic Direction Paper

GI Cloud Adoption and Implementation Roadmap

VARIndia quotes Renu Budhiraja, a Senior Director at DeitY: "Among other things, the Meghraj will  be a repository and marketplace of e-governance apps. These are cloud-ready apps that can run on national clouds or others. They are also downloadable, and can be run at state data centers. The project can find application in areas like Public Distribution Ssystem (PDS)  and land records. However, specifics of such application are yet to be worked out."

A separate Working Group at DeitY headed by  Infosys veteran  Kris Gopalakrishnan is also working on enabling cloud services in India covering aspects like jurisdiction, cross-border data flow, data security, data location etc.

Read more about Meghraj here