India’s data center boom is leaving the people it displaces with nothing
Rest of World Ananya Bhattacharya
India’s data centers are spreading fast, and local people often find out only when construction starts. The big cost isn’t just tech — it’s land, water, and power going to private companies with little say from the people nearby.
Based on reporting by Rest of World, Ananya Bhattacharya — read the original for the full story.
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Osama Manzar has spent more than two decades pushing digital access in India, back when only 1.2% of the country was online. Now, with more than 70% connected, his worry has shifted from access to extraction. He sees AI and the data-center rush as a new version of the same old problem: control and profit concentrating in a few hands while communities absorb the costs.
That concern isn’t abstract. Manzar pointed to estimates that data centers are on track to consume water equal to 1.3 billion people’s annual domestic needs and electricity matching the energy demand of 650 million people by 2030. He said governments are treating these projects as development while striking deals with companies without properly consulting local residents first.
His argument is blunt: if a company wants land, climate, and space, it should have to explain what comes back to the community. Tax breaks, cheap land, and job promises do not answer that question, especially when the machines themselves are highly automated and the companies are not even sure local people can be employed inside them. In his view, many communities only learn what is happening once clearing or construction begins.
He also drew a sharp line between data centers and older forms of industrialization. Factories, he said, usually bring lots of jobs. Data centers do not work that way, and the same AI systems they support may end up replacing the people creating data in the first place. He pointed to campaigning around Visakhapatnam, where Google is building a data center, and to Telangana, where Microsoft is building a data center hub and some acquired land has reportedly been under dispute.
Manzar’s answer is not to reject infrastructure altogether, but to shrink it and scatter it. He argued for hyperlocal, multi-distributed data centers — district-level or even village-level systems that serve local needs first, instead of turning developing countries into “data waste centers” for the global elite. The real fight, he said, is not about cleaner power or less groundwater. It is about whether the data center should exist there at all.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
The industry keeps selling data centers like they’re neutral plumbing, which is a nice trick if you can get away with it. But when the land is local, the water is local, and the power bill lands on everybody, “neutral” is just corporate accent for “not our problem.”
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