The Bureau of Energy Efficiency will start rating, from the next year, the energy-guzzling computer data centres that host companies' networking equipment and applications, on the basis of their efficiency.

"The BEE under the Power Ministry and Indian Green Building Council (IGBC) along with the software giants like Wipro and Infosys is developing a system to measure the data centres," said Prem C Jain, Chairman of IGBC, an arm of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

The data centres would be measurable which means how much the centre can consume beyond their data storage. They will then be rated as "Silver", "Gold" or "Platinum", depending on their consumption capacity, he explained.

Jain was of the opinion that the rating for data centres becomes all the more important in view of rapid growing information technology sector and internet usage.

However, though the guidelines would not be mandatory, he asserted that the rating would help the operators and owners of these centres reduce their environmental impact besides saving energy.

By combining various measures, savings of between 30 and 40 per cent over conventional data centre energy consumption are achievable.

"And unless they (for instance IT firms) opt for green data centres their energy bill will shoot up sharply which is also not good for climate change," he added.

"Several IT companies like IBM and Wipro have already expressed their desire for such a rating system which would help them setting up energy-efficient data centres," Jain said.