The CEEW (Council on Energy, Environment and Water) report by Vishal Tripathi, Debanjan Bagui, Prateek Aggarwal, Peter Hulshof, Arushi Chopra, Daksh Jain, and Avantika Vashishtha examines how prepared India’s data centre ecosystem is to absorb this scale of growth, and whether current market practices, policies, and regulatory frameworks align with long-term resilience.

India does not yet have a binding national policy framework for data centre development, and state governments have taken the lead in shaping the sector’s growth. As India seizes this unprecedented opportunity, it must also strike a fine balance between growth and sustainability as the digital economy is expected to contribute 20 percent of the national income of India by 2030. Decisions being taken now on siting, power sourcing, and cooling technologies will lock in land, energy, and water impacts for decades.

India, with a population of more than 1.5 billion (bn), is positioned to play a pivotal role in shaping the global digital evolution, and has been experiencing rapid digitalisation across sectors under the Digital India initiative. The number of internet subscribers has increased by more than 30 percent over the last 5 years more than 0.8 bn in 2020 to more than 1.02 bn in 2025. The average mobile data consumption in the country reached ~25 GB per user per month in 2024, significantly above the global average of ~19 GB, and is projected to nearly double by 2030. Water and land use intensify pressure on local communities: Beyond being energy-intensive, data centres also consume large volumes of water and strain land, exerting significant pressure on local communities. The global data centre industry currently consumes around 560 bn litres of water annually, equivalent to the domestic water demand of a metropolitan city with roughly 8 million residents.

The report can be bought here.