Power. Water. Capital. Last week, you would have heard these three words more times than you can count. Every panel, every keynote, every address orbits around India’s ability to generate enough electricity, secure enough cooling water, and attract sufficient foreign investment to build the 8 GW of data centre capacity that the nation has targeted by 2030.These are real and important challenges, but that is not the focus here. .It is about the conversations that do not get enough limelight, the one about certification standards tuned for India, and the engineering talent to uphold them. These are the missing blocks of India’s AI puzzle. Unglamorous, invisible to investors, absent from discussions and yet very critical.Global standards, Indian contextHere is a fact that should give every infrastructure professional a pause: India has no mandatory certification framework for data centre design or construction.There is no BIS standard for design verification and commissioning validation. No independent authority to sign off. No certification is required before a single rupee of government incentive is claimed.The international standards frameworks are rigorous, battle-tested, and genuinely valuable. The global data centre industry owes a great deal to the decades of work the standards organisations have put into codifying what good looks like. Many of India’s leading operators already voluntarily align with these standards, and rightly so.The question is not whether these frameworks are credible. They are. The question is whether they are tailor-made for India’s specific conditions. It is simply a geography and context alignment question. Now these global standards need to be fine-tuned for India.India’s data centres operate in conditions that demand their own layer of contextualisation. Ambient temperatures that are very different and may stress cooling systems in different ways. Monsoon-driven humidity cycles introduce corrosion and condensation risks unique to the subcontinent. Grid frequency and voltage fluctuation profiles across Indian states differ significantly from the stable supply assumptions built into Western frameworks. Seismic zone variations create site-specific structural requirements that a single international standard cannot uniformly resolve.What India needs, therefore, is a structured adaptation of the Global Standards Framework. Govt. bodies, Global standards organisations and industry players have both the institutional capability and the strategic opportunity to develop a National Data Centre Certification Framework, one that takes the best of global frameworks as its foundation and builds an India-specific layer on top: calibrated to Indian climate zones, Indian grid characteristics, Indian construction practices, and Indian site conditions. The precedent is instructive: Singapore, facing its own tropical climate challenges, did exactly this by developing SS 564, its national standard for green data centre energy and environmental management, and following it up with SS 697:2023, which turned out to be the world’s first1 standard specifically designed for data centres operating in hot and humid conditions. If Singapore can do it, India can do it too.The engineer India forgot to produceIndia produces over a million engineers annually2. It is, by any measure, an engineering nation. However, data centre engineering is a discipline with almost no formal educational pathway in the country. There are no undergraduate programmes in mission-critical MEP design. No certification tracks for commissioning agents. No industry-academia partnerships are producing specialists in power redundancy architecture, precision cooling systems, or high-density AI infrastructure environments.The result: data centre operators report serious difficulty hiring professionals capable of deploying and managing AI-grade infrastructure3. The thin layer of genuinely qualified engineering talent that does exist is concentrated in Mumbai and Chennai, already stretched far beyond capacity. As the buildout moves to new cities, the talent gap does not travel with it.The skill sets in question are not abstract. They are specific, teachable, and certifiable. Mission-critical MEP design. Commissioning and integrated systems testing. Power systems architecture for n+1 and 2n redundancy topologies. Structured cabling for high-density GPU environments. Computational fluid dynamics for data centre cooling. A National Data Centre Engineering Programme, embedding these disciplines into engineering curricula, with industry-backed certification pathways, needs to be an emergency response to a gap that is widening faster than the facilities being built to fill it.Completing the puzzleGigawatt pledges, billion-dollar deals, and MoUs are necessary. But so are Certification and engineering talent, which will determine how well India’s AI infrastructure leadership is shaped. References:https://www.imda.gov.sg/resources/press-releases-factsheets-and-speeches/press-releases/2023/imda-introduces-sustainability-standard-for-data-centres-operating-in-tropical-climateshttps://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/pursuing-engineering-once-a-fad-now-a-dilemma-only-10-percent-of-15-lakh-graduates-likely-to-land-jobs-this-year/articleshow/114686084.cmshttps://www.deloitte.com/in/en/about/press-room/indias-ai-surge-could-require-an-additional-45-50-million-sq-ft-real-estate.html The article has been contributed by Senthil Kumar R, CEO Technavious. Disclaimer – The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views of The Economic Times. The author is solely liable for the correctness, reliability of the content, and/or compliance with applicable laws.(This article is generated and published by ET Spotlight team. You can get in touch with them on etspotlight@timesinternet.in)



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