S Krishnan, Secretary, MeitY | Photo Credit: cueapi

The government on Friday said that it was pushing for locating a root server in India, given the number of people who use the Internet and in terms of long-term resilience of the Internet system itself.

“This was a long drawn process. There are other ways in which we are making sure that adequate memory is there, mirror sites are there...we are building resilience. It’s not that we are dependent only on that to build resilience. But, I think it’s important from the overall Internet governance point of view that the infrastructure is spread throughout the world,” S Krishnan, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) told reporters.

Speaking on the sidelines of National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) 23^rd Foundation Day programme, Krishnan said that government has asked global Internet body Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for setting up root servers — the core part of Internet for connecting users with websites, in India.

He said that there should be one root server in India to cater to requirements of the huge population of the country. He also noted that the big achievement has been the way that common access has been ensured and more and more people are able to access the Internet in Indian languages.

The root servers help translate domain names into numerical Internet protocol (IP) address which helps locate a website on the Internet.

In February 2024, a parliamentary standing committee report on external affairs said India needs these clusters to speed up response time against cyber/ malware attacks and check such attacks at the ISP gateways itself. It talked about working with ICANN to set up a cluster of 18 servers in India.

According to ICANN, one of the benefits of hosting a root servers is that it can reduce domain name system (DNS) query response time. That means queries would be answered faster than if it had to go to root server instances outside the country. This would also mean lesser bandwidth consumption in answering the queries.

Published on June 19, 2026