Mumbai's Concentration Risk
The digital backbone of India rests on a narrow strip of coastline in Mumbai. Around the Versova neighborhood, 13 of the country's 18 intercontinental submarine cables reach the shore within a six-kilometer span. These cables carry 95% of India’s international bandwidth to Europe, Africa, and West Asia. Anwesha Sen of the Takshashila Institution warns that this geographic concentration creates a severe vulnerability. Should multiple lines fail simultaneously, whether through accidental damage or intentional sabotage, the impact on India's westward data flow would be immediate.
While network architecture allows for traffic rerouting through other landing points in cities like Chennai and Kochi, the process is not instantaneous. Small delays in data transmission can cause significant financial disruption for stock exchanges, banks, and cloud service providers. Artificial intelligence systems, which require immense volumes of high-speed data, face particular risks if these connections experience latency or outages. The reliance on these hidden subsea highways is absolute, as these cables carry 99% of global communication traffic. India now hosts over one billion broadband subscribers, yet its physical control over the infrastructure facilitating this growth remains minimal.
The Infrastructure Paradox
India consumes approximately 20% of global data, yet it connects to only 3% of the world’s submarine cables. The nation currently operates 21 cable landing stations, a tiny fraction of the nearly 1,900 active or planned stations worldwide. Aruna Sundararajan, chairperson of the Broadband India Forum, argues that India must multiply its number of landing stations to support its digital economy. This situation presents a clear paradox: India is emerging as a global power in data centers and internet usage without maintaining sufficient control over the physical assets that link it to the global network.
Adding to this concern is the age of the existing infrastructure. A recent study by the Takshashila Institution indicates that 11 of the 18 active international cables have been in service for more than 20 years. These systems are nearing the standard 25-year end-of-life cycle. Amajit Gupta, CEO of Lightstorm, acknowledges that this is a legitimate focus for the industry. While faults occur frequently due to ship anchors, fishing activity, and natural hazards, India lacks a critical asset to address these breaks: a domestic fleet of subsea cable-repair ships.
Bureaucracy and Future Capacity
Repairing a broken cable in Indian waters currently requires hiring foreign vessels from Dubai or Singapore. Once these ships arrive, they must navigate a complex regulatory environment to obtain operating licenses, a process that can add weeks to the repair timeline. This dependency on foreign capacity and the associated administrative hurdles represent the primary bottleneck for India's digital security. Experts agree that the country needs a robust domestic repair capability and a simplified regulatory framework to ensure that its internet connection remains reliable.
Bureaucracy remains a major obstacle for expansion. Developing a single cable landing station requires securing roughly 50 clearances from 16 different agencies, including defense, home affairs, and shipping authorities. Sundararajan advocates for a single-window system managed by the Department of Telecommunications to streamline approvals. If India intends to become a genuine regional hub for data, it must adopt predictable regulations and pre-approved landing zones. As the nation prepares for an AI-heavy future, the current lag between building data centers and securing the submarine cables that feed them must be closed. New projects, such as the I-2SEA cable system linking India to Malaysia and Singapore, suggest that the industry is beginning to diversify its routes. However, the speed of this physical expansion must match the rapid growth of the country's digital consumption.