Fueled by ultra-affordable data plans, India has rapidly emerged as one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing internet markets, boasting more than one billion broadband subscribers as of late 2025. Behind this digital success story, however, lies a critical, underreported vulnerability in the physical infrastructure that powers the nation’s global connectivity: an overconcentration of critical intercontinental submarine cables in one small stretch of Mumbai coastline, paired with aging infrastructure, a lack of domestic repair capacity, and bureaucratic bottlenecks that threaten to derail India’s ambitious digital and AI-driven growth plans.
The core risk is concentrated in a mere six-kilometer stretch along Mumbai’s Arabian Sea coast near Versova, a densely populated northwestern neighborhood of the city. Of India’s total 18 intercontinental submarine cables— the invisible optical fiber highways that carry 99% of global cross-border data traffic as light pulses across 1.4 million kilometers of ocean floor worldwide— at least 13 come ashore within this tiny geographic zone. Combined, these cables carry up to 95% of India’s total international bandwidth destined for Europe, Africa, and West Asia.
Anwesha Sen, a researcher at the Takshashila Institution, an Indian public policy think tank, warns that this extreme geographic concentration creates an existential critical vulnerability. If multiple cables were cut at the same time, whether by accidental damage or intentional disruption, the vast majority of India’s westbound connectivity would be severely impacted. While modern cable architecture does allow for traffic to be rerouted through other landing points across India’s southern coast, such as Chennai and Kochi, experts note that even minor performance degradation—increased data latency—can carry devastating financial costs for key sectors including banking, national stock exchanges, cloud service providers, and government communications networks. AI infrastructure, which depends on constant high-volume, high-speed data transfers, is uniquely sensitive to even small disruptions to connectivity.
This vulnerability points to a larger paradox at the heart of India’s digital transformation: while the country now accounts for roughly 20% of global data consumption and ranks among the world’s largest internet markets, it controls only a tiny fraction of the global undersea cable infrastructure that powers this digital activity. Data from the Broadband India Forum (BIF) shows that India is connected to just 3% of the world’s total submarine cable network, and hosts only 21 of the roughly 1,900 active and planned cable landing stations (the coastal facilities that connect undersea cables to onshore terrestrial networks) globally—equal to just 1% of the world’s total capacity. “We need to grow the number of cable landing stations several fold,” says Aruna Sundararajan, BIF chairperson.
Compounding the overconcentration risk is the age of India’s existing cable network. A recent analysis from the Takshashila Institution found that 11 of India’s 18 international submarine cables are more than 20 years old, rapidly approaching the standard 25-year nominal operational lifespan for these systems. While routine faults are far more common than deliberate sabotage—with an estimated 150 to 200 cable disruptions annually worldwide, most caused by commercial fishing activity, dragging ship anchors, natural seabed hazards, or equipment failure—India has a second major gap in its preparedness: it has no domestic submarine cable repair vessels. All repair work in Indian territorial waters requires bringing in foreign vessels from ports in Dubai or Singapore, which must then obtain multiple operating licenses before work can begin, adding weeks of delay to an already time-sensitive process.
Amajit Gupta, group CEO and managing director of Lightstorm, a leading Indian digital infrastructure firm, explains that this dependence on foreign repair capacity is the most impactful structural weakness facing India’s connectivity network. “The bigger structural issue for India isn’t rerouting capability—it’s repair capacity. That combination – dependence on foreign repair capacity and regulatory lead times – represents the real bottleneck,” he says. Gupta points to the 2024 Red Sea shipping and cable disruptions as a case study of how unplanned outages can create cascading delays, when global traffic had to be rerouted thousands of miles east through Singapore to reach North American networks.
Beyond repair gaps, India also faces a growing mismatch between exploding demand for international bandwidth driven by AI and data center expansion, and the slow pace of new subsea cable development. Government data shows that India’s installed data center capacity has grown more than fourfold since 2020, jumping from 375MW to 1,575MW today, as companies rush to build computing capacity to power domestic AI model development and global cloud services. All of these facilities rely on fast, reliable subsea connectivity to global networks, but planning and deploying a new submarine cable system takes between five and six years total, meaning new capacity cannot keep up with the rapid growth of data center demand.
Sundararajan identifies fragmented governance and bureaucratic red tape as the single biggest barrier to expanding India’s subsea infrastructure. No fewer than 16 separate government agencies across telecom, defense, home affairs, shipping, port authorities, environmental bodies, and state governments are involved in approving new cable projects and repair operations. Just constructing a single new cable landing station requires roughly 50 separate clearances across more than a dozen ministries. “A core issue is fragmented governance, not a lack of technical capability,” she says. Sundararajan recommends that India’s Department of Telecommunications be designated as the lead central agency, with a single-window approval system to cut wait times for repair vessel permits and new project approvals. She also calls for the government to pre-approve multiple cable landing sites across India’s east and west coasts as well as island territories, so developers do not need to start the approval process from scratch for every new project—an approach that has helped Singapore become a leading regional cable hub through predictable regulation and streamlined processes.
Pooja Bhatt, an associate professor at OP Jindal Global University, notes that the mismatch between India’s digital ambitions and its inadequate core infrastructure can no longer be ignored. “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. The Indian government has already taken one small step to address the issue, officially designating submarine cable systems as critical national telecommunications infrastructure, a classification that industry leaders hope will unlock faster approvals, support the development of a domestic repair fleet, and enable the creation of legally protected zones around cable routes to reduce the risk of accidental damage from fishing and anchoring.
Emerging technologies may also help reduce risk over time: Distributed Acoustic Sensing, a new monitoring tool, can turn existing optical fibers into distributed sensors that detect vibrations from ships, anchors, or underwater vehicles, allowing operators to identify potential threats before a cable is severed. But industry leaders agree that the most critical fixes are low-tech: expanding the number of geographically dispersed cable landing stations, streamlining regulatory approval processes, protecting existing cable routes, and building a domestic fleet of repair vessels.
Gupta notes that connectivity naturally clustered around Mumbai for decades, thanks to existing demand and infrastructure, but that this historic concentration is exactly the risk that the industry must move away from. “But that concentration is exactly the risk the industry needs to design away from,” he says. The shift to greater diversity is already underway: four new submarine cable systems are currently being commissioned across India, with three more in advanced planning stages. One of the new projects, I-2SEA, led by a Lightstorm-led consortium connecting India to Malaysia and Singapore, will feature two separate landing points in India: one at Machilipatnam, which creates a shorter route to the major technology hub of Hyderabad, and a new landing site in South Chennai, adding much-needed geographic diversity to existing networks.
For a country that consumes data at one of the fastest rates in the world and is racing to build capacity for an AI-driven economy, the physical infrastructure that powers its global connectivity remains surprisingly fragile. While India is rapidly expanding its data center capacity and positioning itself as a global digital leader, the open question remains whether it can upgrade its subsea cable network, landing station capacity, and repair ecosystem fast enough to keep pace with its own ambition.