Government departments of the Indian state of Karnataka have reportedly been storing information for over a decade with no backup systems in place.

Information was sent to a data center in Bengaluru, with no copies made to ensure recovery in case of an earthquake, power failure, or any other unpredicted event leading to data loss, according to a report in The Hindu.

Progress costs money

Although the local government has two facilities to its name, both of these are located within a mile of each other and store different types of data. Officials are “considering options” for a disaster recovery site, but concrete plans are yet to be announced. All Karnataka government records post 2004-2005 - when the first data center was opened - are stored in these facilities, meaning there is no physical back-up either.

“Several communications have taken place at the government level, but no concrete action has been taken. In early 2000, Karnataka took the lead in IT applications in public spaces, but has been slack in the last decade. Not having a disaster recovery, a primary necessity in storage space of such large magnitude, also mirrors the State’s interest in IT applications,” a government source told the Hindu.

The cost of operating and maintaining a data center outside of the State, where it would be safe from seismic risk, is presumably what is holding back the investment.

The news falls out of line with the technological shift that has taken place in the rest of the country in recent years. According to an Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) report published earlier this month, data consumption in India is expected to grow twice as fast as the worldwide rate in the next three years, and the country’s data center infrastructure market is set to become the second largest in the Asia Pacific region, expected to reach $4.5 billion in 2018.