Lifelines on the Seabed: The Red Sea Cable Cuts of 2024 and India's Case for Undersea Cable Security, Repair Capacity and Route Redundancy

B.A.P-I Retrospective, 2020 to 2024. This paper looks back at 2024 and the lesson it holds for the protection of India's critical infrastructure.

1. Introduction

Most of the infrastructure on which a modern economy depends can at least be seen. Submarine cables cannot, and for that reason they are among the least governed of all critical assets. They carry around 99 per cent of the world's international internet traffic (TRAI, 2023, Jun. 19), they lie for most of their length in waters no single state controls, and they surface in a handful of landing stations whose locations are no secret to anyone. The Red Sea cable damage of February and March 2024 was the moment when this abstract vulnerability acquired a date, a ship's name and a repair bill.

This paper looks back at that episode with the benefit of two and a half years of hindsight. It asks what actually happened, why India escaped with so little disruption, why that escape should not be mistaken for resilience, and what India has done and still needs to do about cable security, repair capacity and redundancy. The verdict, stated at the outset, is that India's investment in route diversity carried it through, and that the next frontier is sovereign repair capacity and landing diversity.

2. How a Drifting Ship Cut Three Cables

The Belize-flagged Rubymar was struck by ballistic missiles off Yemen's west coast in mid-February 2024. Its crew dropped an anchor and abandoned the ship, which then drifted for almost two weeks through one of the most cable-dense stretches of seabed in the world before sinking. In late February three of the more than a dozen cables crossing the Red Sea, Seacom, the Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE-1) and Europe India Gateway (EIG), were damaged. An early allegation of deliberate sabotage was not supported by evidence, and the Houthis denied targeting the cables. Ryan Wopschall of the International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC) put the prevailing view plainly: "It's generally accepted that the Rubymar dropped an anchor when fired upon and as a result it damaged cables in proximity" (Solon & Hatem, 2024, Mar. 6).

The operational consequence was immediate. HGC Global Communications reported that about 25 per cent of internet traffic in Asia, Europe and the Middle East had to be rerouted (IEEE ComSoc, 2024, Mar. 7). The Observer Research Foundation (ORF) noted that the Red Sea carries 80 per cent of Asia's westward data traffic and estimated the value of the damaged cables at about US$3.5 billion (Patil & Gupta, 2024, May 21). One finds here a pattern that cable engineers have long described. Most faults are not acts of war at all: the ICPC records 150 to 200 cable faults a year worldwide, with commercial fishing and ship anchors responsible for about 70 to 80 per cent of them (ICPC, 2024, Nov. 27). What the Red Sea added was the combination of an ordinary mechanism of damage with an extraordinary security environment, and it was the second that turned a routine fault into a months-long outage.

3. Why India Came Through: Redundancy That Worked

India has 17 submarine cables and up to 14 landing stations across five cities, and it has landing stations on all four systems reported as affected; yet its connectivity was largely unaffected, and two of the damaged cables are partly owned by Tata Communications (Patil & Gupta, 2024, May 21). India came through because it is connected by enough systems, on enough different routes, for traffic to be shifted. That is redundancy by design, and it worked. At sea, too, India acted with confidence: from early 2024 the Indian Navy mounted its largest deployment in the Gulf of Aden and the western Arabian Sea, with 12 warships, independent of the United States and United Kingdom action against the Houthis, rescuing hijacked vessels and their crews and responding to a tanker struck by a missile (Pant & Bommakanti, 2024, Feb. 7). A navy that can secure the sea lanes is the natural guardian of the cables beneath them.

The task now is to build on that strength. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) had observed in June 2023 that the highest concentration of cables is in Mumbai and Chennai, and that some cables terminate at landing stations in those same two cities (TRAI, 2023, Jun. 19). Redundancy at sea is only as good as diversity on land. A route that leaves India westward through the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea shares a corridor with several others, and a landing cluster on a single coastline shares its hazards: cyclone, flood, fire and deliberate attack. The test came again in September 2025, when failures on the SMW4 and IMEWE systems near Jeddah caused latency across the Middle East and South Asia; Indian operators said they saw no immediate impact, citing redundant undersea routes, while Microsoft warned its Azure users of higher latency on traffic through the region (DT Next, 2025, Sep. 7). Twice in under two years the Red Sea corridor failed and India's networks held; the policy aim should be to make that outcome a matter of design on every route, not only on the busiest ones.

4. The Repair Gap: Ships, Permits and Months

The weakest link exposed by 2024 was not the cable but the repair. The three Red Sea systems were restored only in July 2024, by the E-marine cable ship CS Niwa, after attempts had been suspended earlier that month and after permits were obtained from the Houthi-controlled maritime authority in Sana'a; industry observers noted that ship operators were wary of working in dangerous waters alongside a group the United States designates as a terrorist organisation (DCD, 2024, Jul. 25). Restoration therefore took the better part of five months.

India's regulator has already mapped this terrain with care. TRAI found that no Indian service provider is available for cable maintenance, that the two main providers serving Indian waters are based mainly in Singapore and Dubai, that vessels add 10 to 12 days of transit, and that average response times in Indian waters run from three to five months for one provider and four to five months for the other; stakeholders added that import and export clearances consume 30 to 50 per cent of a repair vessel's mobilisation period (TRAI, 2023, Jun. 19). The regulator recommended cable depots on both coasts with special economic zone-like status, and a committee including the Ministry of Shipping and the shipyards at Kochi, Visakhapatnam and Mumbai to study financing models for Indian-flag repair vessels (tele.net, 2023, Jul. 28). The cost of the gap is measurable. For the Chennai-Andaman and Nicobar cable, one stakeholder cited fixed maintenance costs of Rs 7 crore a year and Rs 14 crore per cable cut (TRAI, 2023, Jun. 19).

5. Policy Since 2024: From Recommendation to Rules

There has been steady progress. In January 2024 the Kochi-Lakshadweep Islands cable, about 1,870 km long and funded by the Universal Services Obligation Fund, connected 11 islands to the mainland (NEC, 2024, Jan. 12), a reminder that for island territories a single cable is the whole of their digital lifeline. On 22 November 2024 the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) notified the Telecommunications (Critical Telecommunication Infrastructure) Rules, 2024, under the Telecommunications Act, 2023 (DoT, 2024, Nov. 22). The rules require telecom entities to notify the government of security incidents within six hours, permit remote access for repair or maintenance from outside India only from locations approved in writing in advance, and empower the government to inspect designated infrastructure (SCC Online, 2024, Nov. 25). India thereby gave its critical telecom assets a dedicated statutory protection regime.

These are real gains. The natural next stage is to carry the same discipline from the network operator to the seabed, the repair ship and the corridor, answering the questions 2024 posed: who repairs, how fast, under whose flag and through which route. TRAI's recommendations provide the blueprint, and an integrated architecture that brings protective functions across ministries under one roof would carry them through (Dash, 2021, Jan. 22).

6. Securing the Lifelines: Repair Sovereignty, Landing Diversity and a Single Mandate

Keeping this into consideration, four steps follow. First, India should commission Indian-flag cable repair capacity, at least one vessel stationed on each coast, with pre-cleared customs status for spares held at coastal depots; a repair ship is to the cable network what a fire station is to a city. Second, new landings should be steered away from the Mumbai and Chennai clusters toward other coastal cities, with terrestrial links between landing stations, as TRAI itself proposed. Third, routing diversity should be a declared national objective, with eastward and southern routes valued for their independence from the Red Sea corridor rather than only for their cost. Fourth, protection of cables at sea should be written into maritime security cooperation in the Indian Ocean, including charting and monitoring of cable corridors and rules on anchoring near them.

Above all, one accountable authority should own the problem from seabed to switch. A national resilience architecture that treats critical infrastructure as the third dimension of national security, as the author has argued, would place submarine cables inside that mandate rather than at its margins (Dash, 2025, Jan. 30). The Red Sea showed in 2024 that a drifting anchor can do what an adversary might plan. India has the navy, the regulator, the shipyards and the industry to make its digital lifelines as secure as its sea lanes.