95% of India’s International Data Passes Through One Mumbai Beach: Can The Country Fix Its Undersea Vulnerability?
· Free Press Journal
India's staggering digital growth is being underpinned by a piece of infrastructure that is dangerously concentrated in one small stretch of coastline. Nearly all of India's international bandwidth passes through one beach. At least 13 of India's 18 undersea intercontinental cables come ashore within a six-kilometre radius near Versova in Mumbai, a report by BBC found. Between them, these cables handle up to 95 percent of the country's international data traffic to Europe, Africa and West Asia.
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Anwesha Sen of the Takshashila Institution warned that this geographic clustering leaves the network dangerously exposed, noting that a simultaneous cut to several of these cables - whether by accident or design - could disrupt the bulk of India's bandwidth flowing westward. Cable systems are built with rerouting capacity, so a cut would not black out the internet entirely; traffic could shift to other landing points such as Chennai and Kochi. But even a modest slowdown in data speeds could prove expensive for banks, stock exchanges, cloud providers and government networks with AI systems, which depend on high-volume, high-speed transfers, especially vulnerable to such lag.
Meta's 'Project Waterworth' To Connect India With World's Longest Undersea CableA booming digital economy built on a thin sliver of global infrastructure
Cheap mobile data has turned India into one of the largest internet markets on the planet, with the country crossing a billion broadband subscribers by late 2025. Yet despite accounting for roughly a fifth of global data consumption, India is connected to just 3 percent of the world's submarine cables and holds only around 21 cable landing stations, against nearly 1,900 such sites planned or operating worldwide, according to figures from the Broadband India Forum (BIF).
BIF chairperson Aruna Sundararajan argued that the country urgently needs many more landing stations. Experts told the BBC this mismatch - a fast-growing internet and data-centre economy resting on a thin layer of physical connectivity - sits at the core of India's digital paradox.
Ageing cables and faults add to the risk
A Takshashila Institution paper cited in the report found that 11 of India's 18 international cables are already more than 20 years old, edging toward the roughly 25-year lifespan such systems are built for. Amajit Gupta, group CEO of Lightstorm, acknowledged that a large share of India's cables are nearing the end of their economic life, calling it a legitimate concern.
Deliberate sabotage isn't the primary threat, either. Globally, cable systems suffer an estimated 150-200 faults a year, the large majority caused by fishing activity, ship anchors, natural hazards and equipment failure rather than attacks. Gupta pointed to the Red Sea disruptions as a preview of what happens when traffic has to be rerouted, in that case shifting east through Singapore and on to the US.
Meta's 'Project Waterworth' To Connect India With World's Longest Undersea CableNo domestic repair ships compounds the problem
Perhaps India's starkest weakness is that it has no cable-repair vessels of its own. When a cable breaks, repair ships must be summoned from abroad and then cleared to operate in Indian waters - a process that can take weeks. Sen explained that every cable fault in Indian waters currently relies on foreign repair ships based out of Dubai or Singapore, with licensing requirements adding further delay once a vessel is assigned.
Gupta went further, arguing that India's real structural weakness isn't its ability to reroute traffic but its repair capacity, and that the dependence on foreign vessels combined with regulatory delays forms the actual bottleneck.
AI-driven data centre growth is racing ahead of cable capacity
India's data-centre footprint has expanded rapidly, with installed capacity climbing from 375MW in 2020 to about 1,575MW today, according to government figures. Gupta said the real test isn't whether India is retiring old cables fast enough, but whether new terrestrial and subsea capacity can keep pace with AI-driven demand, stressing that the industry needs to stay ahead rather than play catch-up.
That expansion risks outrunning the cable pipeline. Sundararajan noted that planning a new subsea cable alone takes three to four years, with laying the cable adding up to two more years depending on its length - creating a potential lag between new data-centre capacity coming online and the cable infrastructure needed to feed it.
Bureaucracy may be the bigger obstacle than technology
According to Sundararajan, as many as 16 government agencies spanning telecoms, defence, home affairs, shipping, ports, environment and state authorities are involved in approving the construction, operation and repair of undersea cables. Setting up a single cable landing station can require around 50 clearances across at least 16 ministries - a fragmentation she describes as the core problem, rather than any shortage of technical capability.
She wants India's Department of Telecommunications to take charge as the lead agency, with a single-window clearance system to speed up repair-vessel permits, alongside pre-approved landing sites on both coasts and in island territories so companies aren't forced to restart the approval process each time.
Some fixes are already underway
India has designated submarine cable systems as critical telecommunications infrastructure, a status Sundararajan says should unlock faster clearances, emergency repair protocols, a homegrown repair capability, and legally protected cable corridors that restrict anchoring and trawling near landing sites.
Diversification efforts are already in motion. Four new submarine cable systems are being built, with three more in the pipeline. Lightstorm is leading a consortium behind one of them, I-2SEA, which will connect India with Malaysia and Singapore through dual landing points - one at Machilipatnam, offering a shorter subsea route to Hyderabad, and another at a new site in South Chennai, adding geographic spread beyond the existing Mumbai-heavy network.