Mapping India’s Data Centres: Aspirations, Realities and Futures
The report’s core contribution is to show that India’s data-centre buildout is not a neutral scaling exercise but a governance choice that reallocates water, energy, land, subsidy, and political priority toward compute infrastructure without yet building the disclosure, accountability, and redress mechanisms needed to legitimate that shift.
Review
The report refuses to treat data centres as invisible backend infrastructure. It reads them instead as political infrastructure sitting underneath India’s AI, localisation, and digital sovereignty ambitions. That shift in framing matters. Once data centres are seen as sites where land, water, electricity, tax expenditure, and regulatory attention are allocated, the central issue is no longer whether India should scale compute. It is who gets priority access to scarce resources, on what terms, and with what public justification.
The paper’s sharpest move is to separate localisation from sovereignty. Domestic siting does not automatically produce sovereign control if ownership, tenancy, and strategic dependence remain concentrated in hyperscaler supply chains and foreign partnerships. That is an important corrective to the current policy mood, which too easily treats domestic buildout as proof of autonomy. The report shows that sovereignty rhetoric can obscure rather than resolve the underlying question of who actually governs the infrastructure.
It is also effective on opacity. India’s data-centre expansion is being incentivised faster than it is being made legible. Facility-level disclosure on water use, electricity demand, emissions, and tenancy remains weak or inconsistent. That is not just a research inconvenience. It blocks contestability. Communities cannot assess tradeoffs, regulators cannot benchmark harms, and policymakers cannot tell whether public concessions are buying genuine public value or subsidising extractive scale.
The main limitation is that the report is stronger as diagnosis than as institutional design. It identifies fragmented governance, speculative overbuild, environmental risk, and concentration pressures clearly, but stops short of specifying the control mechanisms that would condition approvals, trigger audits, or enable redress. Even so, it succeeds at the more important first task. It makes clear that India’s data-centre boom is already a governance problem, not merely a technical or investment story.
Key Insight
The report’s core contribution is to show that India’s data-centre buildout is not a neutral scaling exercise but a governance choice that reallocates water, energy, land, subsidy, and political priority toward compute infrastructure without yet building the disclosure, accountability, and redress mechanisms needed to legitimate that shift.