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Nearly 95 percent of India’s international data traffic to Europe, Africa and West Asia passes through undersea cables landing within a six-kilometre stretch near Mumbai’s Versova coast. Experts warn the concentration, ageing cables and dependence on foreign repair ships leave India vulnerable to disruptions as data-centre and AI demand accelerates.

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.

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.

A 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).