Congress MP Dr. Shashi Tharoor on Monday, June 22, 2026, raised pointed questions about the environmental cost of India's rapid data-centre expansion, suggesting the country may need to reconsider the pace at which such facilities are being built given their heavy consumption of water and electricity.

Context

In a terse but pointed post on X, Dr. Tharoor wrote: 'Perhaps we need to slow down on building so many water-guzzling power-burning data centres then?' The remark, framed as a rhetorical question, signals growing unease among legislators about the environmental trade-offs of India's digital infrastructure drive. The Thiruvananthapuram MP has consistently engaged with technology-policy debates, drawing on his background as a former Union Minister of State for External Affairs and former UN Under-Secretary-General.

Policy Backdrop

India's data-centre sector has expanded sharply over the past decade, propelled by the government's Digital India programme — launched in 2015 — and data-localisation mandates that require certain categories of user data to be stored domestically. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued draft Data Centre Policy guidelines in 2020, granting infrastructure status to data-centre parks and signalling that private investment would be actively courted. Global cloud providers and domestic hyperscalers have since announced large capacity additions across states including Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Uttar Pradesh.

The environmental footprint of these facilities, however, has drawn increasing scrutiny. Large data centres consume significant volumes of water for cooling systems and draw heavily on local power grids, at a time when several Indian states still experience periodic electricity shortfalls and groundwater stress is acute in many regions hosting such facilities.

Stakeholders and Impact

Technology firms — both global hyperscalers and domestic cloud providers — stand to be most directly affected by any policy rethink on data-centre approvals or environmental clearance norms. State power utilities in regions with high data-centre density already face pressure to supply uninterrupted, high-quality power to these energy-intensive campuses, sometimes at subsidised industrial tariffs. Environmental groups have argued that the sector's water withdrawal, particularly in water-stressed districts, warrants stricter regulation and mandatory disclosure of consumption metrics.

For ordinary citizens, the tension is tangible: the same electricity grid that powers homes and farms is increasingly shared with server halls running artificial-intelligence workloads and cloud storage for global corporations. Dr. Tharoor's question implicitly asks whether that trade-off has been adequately debated in public policy forums.

What's Next

Parliamentary committees overseeing technology and environment portfolios are expected to examine data-centre sustainability standards in the coming months. Any revision to environmental clearance norms — such as mandatory water-recycling requirements or renewable-energy procurement obligations for new data-centre parks — would reshape the investment calculus for operators already in the pipeline. Dr. Tharoor's intervention adds a legislative voice to what has so far been a largely industry-led conversation, potentially accelerating calls for a greener, more resource-conscious framework for India's digital infrastructure ambitions.