Running out of space on your hard disk to store all your digital photos? Brace yourself for this prediction: in the coming decade, the data usage pattern in India is likely to grow at a rate twice as much as the rest of the world.
The digital information in India will grow from 40,000 petabytes to 2.3 million petabytes, says a study on ‘Digital Universe in India,' sponsored by information infrastructure solution company EMC Corporation and conducted by the IDC Group.
The country's share of digital information is expected to grow 60-fold by 2020, driven by the rollout of 3G/BWA networks, digitisation of television networks and increased technology adoption among individuals, small and medium businesses and enterprises, and in government services such as the Unique ID project and census.
“India will consume twice as much data as the rest of the world,” says Manoj Chugh, president, EMC India and SAARC, and Director of the Global Accounts for EMC Asia Pacific & Japan. “That is the most interesting finding.”
As of 2010, the study finds that the digital data in the country can be stored in 2.5 billion iPads (of 16 GB). The data, if stacked in those iPads one above the other, could form 4,64,000 separate towers of the size of Qutub Minar. Laid end to end, it will form a 600 million meters of iPads, roughly 10 times the running length of the Indian railway network.
While the study itself was commissioned to understand the infrastructure demands of the chief information officers of various small and medium IT enterprises, the data deluge very much includes even the consumers. “Individual consumers are in fact a lot faster in adapting themselves to the changes than even the big corporation. You already see a lot more individuals store their data on cloud computing networks,” Mr. Chugh points out.
Interestingly, already there is 50 per cent digital content surplus being created in the country that does not have storage space.
