Announcing its first move on the Indian government's Smart City project, the $37 billion tech giant Oracle Corp has chosen Maharashtra to accelerate the states digital transformation and set up a Centre for Excellence there.

Towards this, Oracle Global CEO Safra Catz has signed a pact with Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on the sidelines of the onging Oracle OpenWorld conference here, it was announced on Wednesday.

According to the pact, Oracle will create a cloud-based Centre of Excellence (CoE) to help accelerate Maharashtra's 'Smart City' programme and modernise technology solutions. Catz said the project is the most expansive and biggest of its kind.

It will be likely replicated across the country, if successful, she said. However, refusing to give its financial details, she also said the investment will be completely scalable because the focus will be to use the cloud technology for immediate uptake.

"We are thrilled to further our commitment in India by working with the Government of Maharashtra and Prime Minister Narendra Modi to help position India as a world-class design and manufacturing epicenter," Catz said.

"The Cloud Centre of Excellence powered by Oracle will play a key role in improving the lives of the people of this state," she said. The company recently set up nine incubation centers in the country, a massive campus in Bengalaru and launched an annual training initiative for 500,000 students.

"By moving to the Cloud, the government has the opportunity to create a digitally empowered society and a growing knowledge economy. We look forward to making this partnership a success," she added.

According to Fadnavis, the aim is to connect Maharashtra's 29,000 villages by December 2018 to digitally empower gram pancha-yats, schools, primary health centres and other institutions.

"The entire infrastructure creation for this will require investments to the tune of $1 billion," Fadnavis said.

Source: Khaleej Times