A new data center has been inaugurated at the School Education Department in Lahore, the capital of the Punjab province of Pakistan.

Announced by Chief Minister Usman Buzdar, the data center is said to be able to store 140TB of data. Details surrounding the square footage and total capacity were not shared.

The facility will enable the integration of data across all schools, teachers, and students into a single platform for better decision-making, and should result in a 60 percent decrease in the annual expense of IT infrastructure.

The School Education Department is in charge of formulating policies and maintaining education standards in the Punjab region of Pakistan.

The department tweeted about the new facility, saying: “SED's data center will integrate databases and applications of all attached departments, which were being operated in silos, thus resulting in evidence-based decision making, and data-centric implementation of the ongoing reforms.”

The importance of reforms was reiterated by Buzdar at the inauguration, who told attendees that the health and education sectors are a priority of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government, and attention is being paid to improving organizational quality, governance, and access to data, as verified and updated data was a vital component of policy formulation.

Pakistan is currently estimated by Unicef as having 22.8 million children aged 5-16 out of school, giving it the world’s second-highest number of OOSC.

The Punjab province also has significant educational gender disparities. In 2019, girls were educated for a mean number of 4.291 years, while boys received 6.270 years of schooling.

There are hopes that the new data center will also assist the Pakistani initiatives ‘Taleem Ghar,' an educational cable TV channel and smartphone App, and ‘Insaf academy,' a free online academy with lectures and quizzes.