03.09Undersea Cable Infrastructure & Data Network Security

National Resilience | Digital Sovereignty | Strategic Preparedness

The Sector at a Glance

Undersea cable infrastructure is the physical backbone of the digital world. Almost the entire volume of international data, voice and financial traffic that moves between continents travels not through satellites but through fibre-optic cables laid on the seabed, often no thicker than a garden hose in deep water and armoured only where they approach the shore. The sector covered under this tab extends across international and domestic submarine cable systems, cable landing stations, optical repeaters and branching units, power feed equipment, terrestrial backhaul that connects landing stations to data centres and internet exchanges, and the network operations centres that manage traffic, routing and fault response across these systems.

The scope of this tab is not limited to the cable itself. It covers the full lifecycle and security chain behind it: route survey and marine permitting, cable and repeater manufacturing, laying and burial, landing station design and physical protection, cable repair ships and spare depots, network monitoring and cyber defence, and the legal and diplomatic frameworks that govern cables crossing territorial waters and exclusive economic zones. It is this complete chain, and not the possession of capacity on a foreign-owned cable alone, that determines whether Bharat controls its digital lifelines or merely rents them.

Why This Sector Is Critical

Undersea cables carry the traffic on which banking settlements, stock exchanges, cloud services, government communications, defence logistics, e-commerce and the everyday digital life of citizens depend. A cut cable, whether caused by a ship's anchor, a seabed landslide, a deliberate act of sabotage or a cyber intrusion into a landing station, can degrade connectivity across an entire region; when several cables converging on the same landing corridor fail together, the disruption moves from inconvenience to a national continuity crisis. Cables are also an intelligence surface, since traffic at landing stations and on poorly secured network management systems can be tapped, rerouted or monitored by hostile actors.

This is why the BAP-I mandate treats submarine cables as critical information infrastructure rather than as a telecom commodity. The structural vulnerability of the sector lies in concentration: a small number of landing locations, a limited set of global cable manufacturers and laying contractors, and a repair fleet that is thin across the Indian Ocean and largely operated by foreign entities. Repair timelines in a contested sea, or during a regional crisis, cannot be assumed. If the cables fail, the digital economy, financial markets, cloud-dependent public services and the command networks that rely on them all fail with them.

The Bharat Context

Bharat sits at a natural crossroads of the global cable map, between the cable systems linking Europe and the Gulf with Southeast and East Asia, and its western and eastern seaboards host landing stations that serve both domestic demand and transit traffic. Yet the country's landing capacity has remained concentrated in a few coastal cities, ownership of most international systems rests with consortia in which domestic players hold only partial stakes, and indigenous capability in cable manufacturing, repeater technology, marine installation and repair vessels has stayed limited. The distance between being a large consumer of international bandwidth and being a sovereign operator of the infrastructure that carries it is the defining deficit of the sector.

The enabling environment, however, is maturing. The Chennai to Andaman and Nicobar Islands submarine cable and the Kochi to Lakshadweep Islands submarine cable have shown that domestic cable projects can be planned and delivered for strategic connectivity to island territories. The Telecommunications Act, 2023 provides a modern framework for telecom infrastructure, while the Department of Telecommunications, TRAI, CERT-In and NCIIPC carry regulatory, cyber security and critical information infrastructure responsibilities that apply directly to landing stations and network operations. Digital India, BharatNet, the growth of domestic data centre capacity and the shipbuilding and repair ambitions under Sagarmala together confirm that demand for secure, diversified and indigenously supported cable capacity is real and rising. What remains absent is a single national framework that treats cable routes, landing stations, repair readiness and cyber protection as one integrated resilience system; and this is the gap that BAP-I seeks to address through this tab.

Importance of the Sector

Research Focus Possibilities

BAP-I invites original research articles, policy papers, technical reports, diagnostic assessments, case studies and white papers across the following indicative research streams. The list is open-ended; contributions that connect a new question to the resilience objective of this tab are equally welcome.

A. Route Diversity, Chokepoints and Sovereignty

• Mapping Bharat's international cable routes, landing stations and terrestrial backhaul, with identification of single points of failure and concentration risk in landing corridors
• Assessment of maritime chokepoints in the Arabian Sea, Red Sea and Malacca approaches through which Bharat's cable traffic passes, and the consequences of simultaneous multi-cable outages
• Options for new landing locations on the eastern and western seaboards and in the island territories to build geographic diversity
• Ownership, consortium governance and capacity rights: how much control Bharat actually exercises over the systems it depends upon

B. Physical and Cyber Protection

• Threat assessment of accidental damage, anchor drag, seabed hazards and deliberate sabotage, with lessons from documented international cable incidents
• Security architecture for cable landing stations and network management systems, including alignment with CERT-In directions and NCIIPC guidelines
• Use of fibre sensing, maritime domain awareness and vessel tracking data for early warning of threats along cable corridors

C. Repair Readiness, Industry and Supply Chain

• Feasibility of an indigenous cable repair and maintenance vessel capability, including shipyard capacity, crewing and spares depots
• Indigenisation pathways for submarine cable, optical repeaters, branching units and power feed equipment, and the barriers to qualification
• Trusted source frameworks for cable equipment and the security implications of vendor concentration

D. Law, Policy and Regional Cooperation

• Adequacy of domestic law and UNCLOS provisions for protecting cables in territorial waters, the EEZ and the high seas, and gaps in penalties and enforcement
• Permitting and clearance processes for cable landing and laying, and their effect on deployment timelines and investment
• Regional frameworks with Indian Ocean partners for cable protection, joint repair arrangements and incident response
• Cable planning as part of national connectivity strategy, linking data centres, digital public infrastructure and island connectivity

Who Can Participate

This tab invites participation from telecom operators and cable consortium members, data centre and internet exchange operators, the Department of Telecommunications, TRAI, CERT-In and NCIIPC, the Indian Navy and Indian Coast Guard, ocean science institutions such as NIOT, NIO and INCOIS, shipyards and marine service companies, optical and electronics manufacturers, IITs and other technical institutions working on optical networks and cyber security, maritime law and international relations scholars, start-ups in fibre sensing and maritime analytics, and individual researchers with domain expertise. Contributions from practitioners, policymakers and academics carry equal standing within the BAP-I research framework.