The RBI data centre and Cybersecurity Training Institute in Bhubaneswar opened on Sunday, October 25, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Reserve Bank of India facility. The new site will house the central bank’s mission-critical payment systems, including RTGS and NEFT.
The campus covers 18.55 acres at Info Valley-II in Jatni, near Bhubaneswar. It is the RBI’s fourth data centre. The other three are in Maharashtra, and Governor Sanjay Malhotra told The Economic Times that a site far from them, in a different seismic zone, gives the bank more geographic spread. He described the new centre as sovereign, run without third-party cloud service providers.
One-third of the site is for the data centre and two-thirds for the training institute, which will train RBI staff and employees of banks and other financial firms in cybersecurity, AI, big data analytics, quantum computing and blockchain. Malhotra said that although NPCI runs UPI, final settlement of UPI transactions passes through RBI data centres and applications.
- Cost: ₹169 crore (The Times of India)
- Foundation stone laid: March 22, 2023
- UPI volume: more than 2,400 crore transactions a month, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said at the event
Why it matters: RTGS, NEFT and UPI settlement all run on RBI systems around the clock, so a fourth site outside Maharashtra lowers the chance that one regional event halts interbank settlement. Keeping core systems off third-party cloud platforms also shows how much control the regulator wants over payment data, which may shape what it asks of banks and payment firms. The institute, open to staff from banks and other financial firms, gives the RBI its own channel to raise cyber skills across the sector it supervises.
Source: RBI press release, October 25, 2026; The Economic Times; The Times of India; Moneycontrol
Image: Subhrasingh, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
