India's digital economy now generates more data than almost any country on earth. Yet roughly 99% of the intercontinental traffic carrying that data — every video call to Bengaluru, every cloud workload routed through Mumbai, every UPI ping settled abroad — moves not over satellites but through a small number of fragile glass strands lying on the seabed. India currently hosts around 17 international submarine cable systems, landing primarily at Mumbai, Chennai, Cochin and Tuticorin. For a country of 1.4 billion people and a stated ambition to become a global data and AI hub, that is a thin foundation.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) recognised this in its June 2023 Recommendations on Licensing Framework and Regulatory Mechanism for Submarine Cable Landing in India, which described the existing regime as fragmented, slow and out of step with India's data growth. Almost two years on, the core problems TRAI identified remain unresolved — and the cost of inaction is rising.
A regime designed for a smaller internet
India's current framework grew piecemeal out of the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885 and the International Long Distance (ILD) licensing regime issued by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT). The Telecommunications Act, 2023 has now replaced the colonial-era statute, but the operational rules governing cable landing stations (CLS), beach manhole construction, marine surveys and repair operations still rely on a patchwork of older instruments and clearances from at least half a dozen ministries: DoT, Home Affairs, Defence, Environment, Shipping, and the Customs administration.
The practical effect is well known to every operator who has tried to land a cable in India. Industry submissions to TRAI report that obtaining the full set of permissions — Right of Way for the marine route, environmental clearance, security clearance, customs handling for repeater spares, and the ILD-tied CLS authorisation — typically takes 18 to 24 months, and sometimes longer. By contrast, Singapore routinely processes equivalent approvals in under six months, and the United Arab Emirates has built a one-stop CLS regime around its Khalifa landing zone. The result is predictable: investors increasingly route systems around India rather than through it. The SEA-ME-WE 6, 2Africa Pearls, and Meta's forthcoming hyperscale projects all touch India, but not always at the bandwidth or branching count Indian users would benefit from most.
Repair capacity is the silent crisis
Even more pressing than landing rights is repair. The early-2024 incidents in the Red Sea — when anchor strikes severed multiple cables including AAE-1, EIG, Seacom and TGN-EA — degraded roughly a quarter of Asia–Europe capacity overnight, and Indian enterprise users felt it immediately in higher latency and rerouted traffic. The International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC) estimates that there are between 150 and 200 cable faults globally each year, and that the global fleet of around 60 cable repair ships is already stretched.
India has no Indian-flagged cable repair vessel. Repairs to cables in Indian waters depend on foreign-flagged ships that need fresh permits each time they enter the Exclusive Economic Zone — permits that, again, can take weeks. During that window, traffic reroutes through congested alternative paths, raising costs for Indian businesses and degrading service for Indian users. A regime that treats cable repair as an exceptional event rather than routine maintenance is a regime that will keep paying this tax indefinitely.
What proportionate reform looks like
None of this is an argument against security oversight. Submarine cables are critical infrastructure, and the legitimate interests of the Ministry of Defence and the National Security Council Secretariat in vetting routes, equipment vendors and CLS operators are real. But proportionate regulation means matching the depth of review to the actual risk — and consolidating, not duplicating, the touchpoints. Several reforms are achievable now:
- A single-window clearance authority for cable landings, as TRAI recommended, with statutory timelines and deemed approvals if agencies do not respond.
- Standing authorisations for cable repair vessels, replacing one-off permits with pre-cleared operator lists and notification-based entry into the EEZ for emergency repairs.
- Recognising CLS as 'essential telecom infrastructure' under the Telecommunications Act 2023, granting it the same Right of Way protections as terrestrial fibre.
- Permitting in-country branching and stub cables, so that domestic operators can extend international systems to additional Indian coastlines without re-running the full national security review.
- Tax and customs reform on imported repeaters, branching units and spare parts, which currently attract duties that have no analogue in competing hub jurisdictions.
India does not need to choose between security and connectivity. It needs to stop pretending the two are in tension at every administrative step.
The window is narrow
The subsea cable industry's investment cycle is long: a system planned today lands in 2029 or 2030. If India wants to host the AI training workloads, hyperscaler regions and content-delivery footprints that its market clearly justifies, the permitting environment of 2026 is what determines the bandwidth available in 2030. Singapore, Japan and the UAE understood this a decade ago, and built regulatory regimes around it. India still can — but the policy work has to start now, with the rules under the Telecommunications Act 2023 that DoT is currently drafting. Streamlining cable landing is not deregulation; it is the kind of competent, evidence-based state capacity that an open digital economy requires.