Good call to revisit data centre policy

Karnataka can consider moving the water-intensive sector to coastal districts.

Karnataka’s decision to revisit its data centre policy is both timely and prudent.

As the digital economy expands at breakneck speed, governments worldwide are grappling with the environmental costs of the infrastructure that powers it.

By reviewing a policy that is barely a few years old, IT and BT Minister Priyank Kharge has acknowledged a fundamental reality: technological progress cannot come at the expense of ecological sustainability.

Bengaluru is celebrated as India’s information technology capital, the city where software innovation flourished and the digital services economy took root.

Yet, the next phase of the digital revolution—driven by artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and big data—depends not merely on human talent but also on vast physical infrastructure.

Data centres require enormous tracts of land, uninterrupted electricity, and, above all, large quantities of water for cooling. In a city already struggling with water scarcity and strained infrastructure, the unchecked expansion of such facilities risks deepening an unsustainable situation.

Data centres operate round the clock, housing thousands of servers that generate intense heat. To prevent system failure, massive cooling systems must run continuously, often consuming nearly as much electricity as the computing equipment itself. Water, meanwhile, is widely used in cooling towers to regulate temperature.

Even a modest facility can consume millions of litres of water annually. In a city where water must be pumped from the Cauvery over long distances—and where legal caps limit the volume that can be drawn—such consumption inevitably raises uncomfortable questions about priorities.

However, the dilemma cannot be resolved simply by opposing data centres.

They have become an indispensable component of the modern economy. Every digital payment, video stream, cloud service or artificial intelligence query relies on servers housed in these facilities.

They support innovation, enable businesses to operate globally, and form the backbone of emerging technologies that will shape the future. In that sense, they are indeed a “necessary evil”, essential to economic progress but demanding careful management of their environmental footprint.

The state government’s move to reconsider the location and regulatory framework for data centres, therefore, deserves support. Encouraging such facilities to develop in regions with better access to water and connectivity, particularly coastal areas, could ease the burden on Bengaluru while still allowing Karnataka to remain a major digital hub.

It would also place data centres closer to international subsea cable landing stations, providing the high-speed global connectivity that landlocked Bengaluru cannot offer.

The challenge ahead is to strike a delicate balance: embracing the opportunities of the data-driven economy while ensuring that the infrastructure powering it does not exhaust the very resources on which cities depend.