India’s international internet connectivity relies significantly on submarine cables, with approximately 95% of the country’s westward bandwidth to Europe, Africa, and West Asia passing through at least 13 cables landing within a six-kilometre stretch near Mumbai’s Versova neighbourhood. This geographic concentration creates a critical vulnerability, as simultaneous cuts to multiple cables could severely degrade network performance, with potential consequences for financial institutions, cloud providers, and artificial intelligence infrastructure that depends on high-speed data transfers.
The concentration reflects a broader infrastructure imbalance. Despite consuming roughly 20% of global data, India is connected to only about 3% of the world’s submarine cables and operates approximately 1% of global cable landing stations. Additionally, roughly 61% of India’s 18 international cables exceed 20 years in age, approaching the typical 25-year lifespan of submarine cable systems, raising concerns about potential failures as these systems near the end of their economic life.
India currently lacks domestic capacity to repair undersea cables, depending instead on foreign repair vessels that must obtain permits to operate in Indian waters—a process that can add weeks to repair timelines when cable faults occur. Submarine cable faults happen globally at an estimated rate of 150 to 200 annually, typically caused by fishing activities, ship anchors, natural hazards, and equipment failures rather than deliberate sabotage.
Experts identify regulatory fragmentation as a fundamental obstacle to expanding India’s submarine cable infrastructure. Establishing a cable landing station requires approximately 50 clearances across 16 ministries spanning telecommunications, defence, home affairs, shipping, ports, and environmental agencies. Cable planning and installation independently require six to seven years combined. India’s rapidly expanding data-centre capacity, which has grown from 375 megawatts in 2020 to approximately 1,575 megawatts, may outpace available submarine cable capacity, particularly given artificial intelligence’s bandwidth demands.
Stakeholders recommend streamlining governance through a single-window approval system, pre-identifying and pre-approving multiple landing sites across both coasts, and establishing predictable regulatory frameworks to support the infrastructure development required for India to function as a regional digital hub.
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