  In order to deliver the full science potential of the Square Kilometer Array
(SKA) telescope, several SKA Regional Centres (SRCs) will be required to be
constructed in different SKA member countries around the world. These SRCs will
provide high performance compute and storage for the generation of advanced
science data products from the basic data streams generated by the SKA Science
Data Handling and Processing system, critically necessary to the success of the
key science projects to be carried out by the SKA user community. They will
also provide support to astronomers to enable them to carry out analysis on
very large SKA datasets. Construction of such large data centres is a technical
challenge for all SKA member nations. In such a situation, each country plans
to construct a smaller SRC over the next few years (2022 onwards), known as a
proto-SRC. In India, we propose to construct a proto-SRC which will be used for
the analysis of data from SKA pathfinders and precursors with strong Indian
involvement such as uGMRT, Meerkat and MWA. We describe our thinking on some
aspects of the the storage, compute and network of the proto-SRC and how it
will be used for data analysis as well as for carrying out various simulations
related to SKA key science projects led by Indian astronomers. We also present
our thoughts on how the proto-SRC plans to evaluate emerging hardware and
software technologies and to also begin software development in areas of
relevance to SKA data processing and analysis such as algorithm implementation,
pipeline development and data visualisation software.
