Is India's internet boom running into an undersea problem?

One of India's biggest digital vulnerabilities sits on a six-kilometre stretch of Mumbai's Arabian Sea coast.

Around Versova, a densely populated neighbourhood on the city's northwest, at least 13 of India's 18 intercontinental submarine cables , external come ashore within six kilometres of one another.

Together they carry as much as 95% of India's international bandwidth to Europe, Africa and West Asia.

"This network faces a critical vulnerability due to severe geographic concentration," says Anwesha Sen of Takshashila Institution, a think tank.

"If several of those cables were cut simultaneously, either accidentally or deliberately, a bulk of India's westward bandwidth to West Asia, Africa and Europe would be impacted."

Cable architecture allows traffic to be rerouted, so a cut would not cause a total blackout.

Traffic could be diverted through other landing points, including the southern cities of Chennai and Kochi, say experts. (India's 18 subsea cables land in Mumbai, Chennai, Cochin, Tuticorin, and Trivandrum.)

But even performance degradation - small increases in the time it takes data to travel - could be costly for banks, stock exchanges, cloud providers and government networks. AI infrastructure may be particularly sensitive because it relies on high-volume, high-speed data transfers.