The Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) informed Parliament that the fire at its primary data centre in New Delhi on 5 June did not disrupt core statutory filing or company incorporation services.
The Ministry stated that its disaster recovery mechanism functioned as intended, ensuring uninterrupted operations, and confirmed that no application data was lost.
Finance and Corporate Affairs Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had answered a starred question in the Lok Sabha that the disaster recovery plan was invoked after the incident, with MCA 21 services activated from the Disaster Recovery Centre in Chennai within the mentioned recovery time.
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The minister mentioned specific ancillary back-office systems need additional synchronisation, validation and recovery before being restored. No part of the core front-office MCA 21 services was affected and did not interfere with statutory filings or company incorporation services.
The government rejected claims that its disaster recovery and business continuity mechanisms had failed, stating that the systems were activated immediately after the fire and successfully restored core services within the stipulated contractual recovery timeline.
The Ministry also clarified that there was no prolonged disruption to the core MCA21 portal after the disaster recovery mechanism was activated.
To minimise the impact of system restoration and capacity enhancement activities, it introduced several relief measures, including a waiver of additional filing fees for specified statutory filings, an extension of approved name reservation validity, and extra time for the resubmission of e-forms.
As per the preliminary technical assessment, the fire arose in or around the battery room or an adjacent utility area of the data centre, which also includes the infrastructure of the other agencies.
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The incident had impacted compute, storage, network, security, and supporting infrastructure due to exposure to fire, soot, and moisture.
The government mentioned that there is no loss of application data and no proof of any cybersecurity violation or compromise of application data associated with the incident.
Currently, the ministry denied considering the modernisation of the MCA’s digital infrastructure with geographically distributed backup systems.
