Is India's internet boom running into an undersea problem?

India's digital transformation is powered by submarine cables, which bring in the bulk of the country's international bandwidth. However, these cables are concentrated in a six-kilometer stretch near Versova, Mumbai, creating a critical vulnerability. If several of these cables were cut simultaneously, either accidentally or deliberately, a significant portion of India's westward bandwidth to Europe, Africa, and West Asia would be impacted.

Cable architecture allows for traffic rerouting, so a cut wouldn't cause a total blackout. However, even performance degradation can be costly for banks, stock exchanges, cloud providers, and government networks. AI infrastructure, in particular, may be sensitive to small increases in data travel time due to its reliance on high-volume, high-speed data transfers.

India's growing digital economy and services sector increasingly depend on these cables. Yet, India accounts for roughly 20% of global data consumption but is connected to only about 3% of the world's submarine cables, which is less than 1% compared to the global average of about 1,900 planned and active submarine cable landing stations. This paradox highlights the need for India to grow the number of cable landing stations several folds.

Currently, 11 of India's 18 international cables are more than 20 years old, nearing their operational lifespan. India also lacks domestic subsea cable-repair ships, relying on foreign repair ships from Dubai or Singapore for cable faults. This dependence on foreign repair capacity and regulatory lead times represent the real bottleneck.

India's bureaucracy, involving 16 agencies across various ministries, also contributes to the delay in constructing, operating, and repairing subsea cables. The question is whether India can keep up with the demand for AI-driven data transfers and whether new terrestrial and subsea capacity can keep pace with the evolving needs of data centers.