Is Indias internet boom running into an undersea problem?
Pooja Bhatt, an associate professor at OP Jindal Global University, says that mismatch is increasingly difficult to ignore. “Given its young demographics and ‘Digital India’ aspirations, it makes sense for the nation to build and maintain its own internet infrastructure for security and governance purposes,” she says. India has already taken a step: the government…
Pooja Bhatt, an associate professor at OP Jindal Global University, says that mismatch is increasingly difficult to ignore.
“Given its young demographics and ‘Digital India’ aspirations, it makes sense for the nation to build and maintain its own internet infrastructure for security and governance purposes,” she says.
India has already taken a step: the government now treats submarine cable systems as critical telecommunications infrastructure, recognising their importance to international connectivity.
Sundararajan says the designation should bring faster clearances, emergency repair mechanisms and an Indian cable-repair capability, along with legally protected cable zones around landing sites and routes, restricting anchoring and trawling.
Technology could help too.
A technology called Distributed Acoustic Sensing can turn optical fibres into sensors capable of detecting vibrations from ships, anchors or underwater vehicles – potentially identifying threats before a cable is severed.
But the immediate fixes are possibly more mundane: more landing stations, greater geographical diversity, faster permissions, protected cable routes and an Indian repair capability.
“Connectivity has historically clustered around Mumbai because the ecosystem, infrastructure and demand were already concentrated there,” Gupta says. “But that concentration is exactly the risk the industry needs to design away from.”
That shift is already beginning.
Four new submarine cable systems are being commissioned, external, with three more planned. Lightstorm is leading a consortium building one of them, I-2SEA, linking India with Malaysia and Singapore. The system will have dual landings in India – at Machilipatnam, providing a shorter subsea route to Hyderabad, and at a new landing location in South Chennai, adding diversity to existing routes.
For a country consuming data at extraordinary speed, the infrastructure carrying it remains surprisingly fragile. India is adding data centres and preparing for an AI-heavy future. The question is whether its cables, landing stations and repair capacity can keep up.
