On 29 May 2026, UK telecoms minister Baroness Liz Lloyd announced plans to replace 140-year-old legislation governing submarine communications cables with a modern regime built on three pillars — resilience, deterrence and security (GOV.UK). The proposals would impose security obligations on cable owners to prevent, detect and respond to compromises; create criminal penalties, including prison terms, for vessel operators who intentionally or recklessly damage cables; and grant emergency powers to direct businesses during major incidents. A white paper and consultation will follow.
The statute Britain is retiring dates to 1885. So does the law India already retired. The Indian Telegraph Act, 1885 — the colonial-era backbone of Indian communications regulation — was repealed by the Telecommunications Act, 2023, which came into force in 2024. On the question of legacy law, India is, unusually, ahead of London. The harder question is whether the modern scaffolding India has built actually protects the cables that carry the overwhelming majority of its international internet traffic.
The case for tougher cable rules is real
It is worth stating the security argument at full strength before quibbling with it. Subsea cables are concentrated chokepoints: the UK government notes that roughly £1.4 trillion in daily transactions depend on them, and the British announcement followed the exposure of covert Russian activity around UK undersea infrastructure. India's exposure is structurally worse. A large share of its capacity transits the Red Sea and the Strait of Malacca — waters that saw multiple cable cuts off Yemen in 2024-25. When sabotage or anchor-dragging is a live threat, a state that cannot compel operators to harden, monitor and rapidly restore service is a state that has outsourced national resilience to commercial convenience. That is the strongest case for Lloyd's three pillars, and it is a serious one.
India's gap is operational, not statutory
Where the steelman thins is in assuming new criminal law and security mandates are the binding constraint. India's Telecommunications Act, 2023 already contains the security architecture the UK is now drafting. Section 22 lets the central government designate any network — explicitly including submarine systems under the new wireline rules — as Critical Telecommunication Infrastructure, with mandated standards and security practices. India does not lack the power to compel resilience. What it lacks is the physical and procedural capacity to deliver it.
Consider repair. India hosts 17 international submarine cable systems and roughly 193 Tbps of capacity, yet TRAI Chairman Anil Kumar Lahoti has noted the country accounts for just 1% of the world's cable landing stations and should expand that footprint tenfold (Outlook Business). More tellingly, India operates no indigenous cable-repair ship: operators must contract consortiums based in Dubai and Singapore, and foreign repair vessels need clearances from multiple agencies plus a government representative aboard during repairs — a process that lengthens outages while a cut bleeds capacity (ORF). With over 200 submarine-cable repairs globally in 2023 alone, fast restoration is not a theoretical concern; it is the daily reality of running a network.
The right lesson from London
This is where the UK package is genuinely instructive — and where India should copy selectively. Lloyd's first pillar is resilience through growth, and Britain has paired its security talk with formal endorsement of the European Subsea Cables Association's fishing-liaison guidelines and an 8-day repair benchmark. The deterrence pillar criminalises reckless damage, but the UK is honest that up to 97% of cable faults come from fishing gear and anchors, not hostile states. A regime that treats accidental snags and sabotage identically will mostly generate paperwork for fishermen while doing little against a determined adversary who already faces life imprisonment under existing hostile-state law.
India's own regulator has, to its credit, already pointed the proportionate way. TRAI's June 2023 recommendations on submarine cable landing proposed a lighter two-tier model — a Main Cable Landing Station plus cheaper CLS Points of Presence — and urged scrapping the customs bond for repair vessels and ending repeated clearances for crews holding valid Indian work permits (TRAI). The 2025 Captive Telecommunication Services Rules, operationalised in early 2026, went further, letting enterprises land their own cables and run dark fibre to in-house facilities without a full telecom licence (Submarine Networks).
What proportionate looks like
The through-line of good cable policy is that deterrence is cheap to legislate and expensive to enforce, while resilience is the reverse. India has the deterrent statute. What moves the needle is permitting a domestic repair-ship industry through public-private partnership, putting environmental and coastal-zone clearances online via Saral Sanchar, and pre-clearing repair vessels so a fault off Chennai does not wait on an inter-ministerial committee.
Britain's instinct to modernise a Victorian law is sound, and India was right to do it first. But a Critical Infrastructure designation that is not matched by ships, crews and fast clearances protects a cable on paper and nowhere else. The pro-innovation move is not another security mandate layered on Section 22 — it is spending the political capital to make the cables India already has cheaper to land, faster to fix, and easier to multiply.