The Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) has told Parliament that the fire at its primary data centre in New Delhi on June 5 did not disrupt core statutory filing and company incorporation services, asserting that its disaster recovery mechanism functioned as intended and no application data was lost.
Replying to a starred question in the Lok Sabha, Finance and Corporate Affairs Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the Disaster Recovery Plan was invoked immediately after the incident, with core MCA21 services activated from the Disaster Recovery Centre in Chennai within the stipulated recovery time.
The minister said certain ancillary back-office systems required additional synchronisation, validation and recovery before being fully restored. However, these were not part of the core front-office MCA21 services and did not interrupt statutory filings or company incorporation services.
Rejecting suggestions that the disaster recovery and business continuity mechanisms had failed, the government said the systems were activated immediately after the fire and restored core services within the contractual recovery timeline.
The ministry further said there was no prolonged outage of the core MCA21 portal after activation of the disaster recovery mechanism. However, to mitigate the impact of restoration and capacity enhancement activities, it introduced relief measures including waiver of additional filing fees for certain statutory filings, extension of approved name reservation validity and additional time for resubmission of e-forms.
According to the preliminary technical assessment, the fire originated in or around the battery room or an adjacent utility area of the data centre, which also housed infrastructure belonging to other agencies. The incident affected compute, storage, network, security and supporting infrastructure due to fire, soot and moisture exposure.
The government said no loss of application data had been observed and there was no evidence of any cybersecurity breach or compromise of application data linked to the incident.
On whether it plans to modernise the MCA’s digital infrastructure with geographically distributed backup systems, the ministry said such measures are not considered necessary at present.
