When cyclones batter Odisha's coast, government digital services go dark at the worst possible moment. Odisha Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi announced on Thursday, October 15 that his State Cabinet has approved a ₹176.83 crore Disaster Recovery-cum-Data Centre in Kendujhar — a facility designed to keep those services running no matter what hits.

A Campus in Kendujhar Becomes the State's Digital Lifeline

The facility will be built on the campus of Dharanidhar University in Keonjhar district — an inland location that is by design. Odisha's coastline regularly absorbs cyclone landfalls; placing critical digital backup infrastructure well away from the sea is the first line of resilience. The centre's mandate is threefold: protect existing e-government data, harden cybersecurity defences, and ensure swift service restoration after any disaster — natural or cyber.

CM Majhi's post, published in Odia alongside English, described the centre as 'ଅତ୍ୟାଧୁନିକ' ('state-of-the-art'), signalling that the government intends this to be more than a backup vault — it is a fully equipped secondary operations hub.

Why Kendujhar, Why Now

Indian states have been steadily building secondary data centres outside their capitals since the mid-2010s, a trend accelerated by the national Digital India programme launched in 2015. Odisha's primary facility, the Odisha State Data Centre, sits in Bhubaneswar — a coastal-proximate capital that itself has been in the path of major cyclones. The Kendujhar centre is meant to mirror and recover that infrastructure if Bhubaneswar goes offline.

Kendujhar, a northern Odisha district historically known for iron-ore mining, has been gaining institutional weight with the presence of Dharanidhar University. Anchoring a high-value government tech facility there adds a layer of digital-economy significance to a region long defined by extraction industries.

What the ₹176.83 Crore Must Deliver

The Cabinet approval marks the policy green light; the harder work — tender issuance, construction milestones, and live integration with the Bhubaneswar data centre — lies ahead. The investment will be watched for how quickly it moves from approval to operational status, and whether it achieves the cybersecurity standards increasingly mandated for state government IT systems by the central government's frameworks.

For citizens of Odisha, the stakes are tangible: health records, land registries, welfare transfers, and emergency-response coordination all run on digital rails that this centre is meant to protect. Get this right, and the next major cyclone finds government services still standing.