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A large, developing country, ambitious for growth and stature like India needs to look after four key securities: food, energy, market, and tech. In this pursuit, it can’t hope to depend on friends. Rather, it must cultivate allies – even global competitors – to realise its hopes without threat of interruption or interference.
This is critical in an age where the US has initiated a disruptive transformation of the global geopolitical structure, utilising taxes and sanctions to realign trade relationships, which will likely result in short-term national and financial market insecurities.
Of the above interests, tech security holds the key to both economic and political sovereignty. But India’s greatest weakness is lack of access control to first-mile internet traffic, managed through a subsea cable ecosystem – consisting of submarine cables and cable landing stations (CLSs), which are largely owned and leased by international players not necessarily invested in the digital sovereignty or cybersecurity of the nation.
In 2023, there were more than 500 subsea cables and 1,300 CLSs worldwide controlled by multinational telecom service provider consortiums, or by cloud, network and internet service providers like Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft. Similarly, 90% of subsea cable manufacturing and laying industry consists of the US’ SubCom, Japan’s Fujitsu and NTT, among others, and Finland’s Alcatel Submarine Networks. China’s HMN Technologies (earlier Huawei Marine Networks) has become the world’s fastest layer of subsea cables, maintaining and repairing 25% of all subsea infrastructure. By contrast, BSNL, Reliance and Bharti-Airtel own, or partially own, only a handful of the 17 undersea cables that terminate in India.
There are two major geopolitical implications of a foreign-owned subsea cable ecosystem:
Vulnerability to cyberattacks and cyber espionage, for which the US has long accused HMN.
Subsea cables can be weaponised during heightened international tension. In March 2023, for instance, Taiwan’s peripheral island, Matsu, faced an internet shutdown resulting from severed subsea cables, for which China was blamed. More recently, Houthi rebels, in addition to sinking and harassing merchant ships, have also taken to cutting undersea cables in the Red Sea – in which, to India’s chagrin, repair has been time-consuming and expensive.
On March 4, when the PEACE submarine cable was severed, interrupting internet traffic between Asia and Europe, repair work took 3 weeks. Other disruptions, like that of the AAE-1 cable, took 4 months to restore.
Any power, directly or through its proxies, could exercise motive, means or opportunity, to exploit India’s digital vulnerabilities.
India, therefore, needs to prepare contingency plans and capacities in 3 areas to stave off threats of espionage, cyberattacks, political interference and digital disruption.
Short term India, which currently relies on foreign-flagged vessels for repairs within its EEZs, should establish its own cable repair vessels with prioritised response capabilities to reduce dependency on foreign assets, minimise uptime delays and reduce digital vulnerability. This ability to respond swiftly to cable disruptions could also potentially serve as a diplomatic tool to assist neighbouring Indian Ocean nations.
Medium term India must dramatically increase the number of CLSs along its extensive peninsula. Trai suggests that while many private players like Tata, Reliance and Bharti-Airtel are major stakeholders in this area, the number of CLSs – currently accounting for about 1% globally – needs to increase 10x to manage the appetite for data volumes and support India’s ambition to become a credible digital hub. Streamlining regulatory approvals and providing economic incentives could greatly expedite this.
Long term India needs comprehensive and holistic legislation on construction and laying of communication cables to develop robust national security architecture. Trai has recommended including a section in the Indian Telecommunication Bill 2022 to promote, protect and classify submarine cables and CLSs as ‘essential services’, to protect critical information infrastructure, of which submarine cables constitute the first mile of digital connectivity.
This last won’t be easy. It’s expensive, competitive and demanding of a high order of expertise. India will need to forge strategic alliances with regional and congruent interests like BRICS, or even China, to fill the gap. This may be more valuable and sustainable than a collective agreement to continue to purchase cheap oil, raise counter-tariffs or develop a new currency to undo the hegemony of the dollar.
Ultimately, in a world where the US eschews a shared global agenda and explicitly demands that local companies only work with US firms, extraterritorially, on critical digital hardware – it has threatened Indian corporations with sanctions in the recent past for trying to challenge this – India needs to look farther afield, and work with both ostensible friends and erstwhile enemies to meet the needs of national security and digital sovereignty.
Tankha is founder-CEO, ALSOWISE Content Solutions, and Banerjee is professor of marketing, University of Michigan, US
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