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Amid growing concerns over the upcoming hyperscale data centre near Vizag city being built by Google and the Adani Group, Andhra Pradesh IT Minister Nara Lokesh has defended the project. He said examples of resource depletion, environmental degradation and pollution from the United States cannot be applied to India.
Nara Lokesh also said his government was willing to listen to youngsters opposed to data centres, even as the Andhra Pradesh police sought to censor social media posts critical of the projects.
“It’s important to have conversations with people who believe that data centres are not good. Why do they believe that? A few examples from the US are bad examples for us in this country. We have one nation, one grid, which the US doesn’t have,” Lokesh said, referring to the integration of regional power grids in India. Lokesh was speaking at a conference on the theme ‘New Frontiers of Growth,’ organised by Bank of America in Mumbai on Monday, June 1.
He dismissed worries over water consumption, reiterating his government’s stance that nearly 3000 TMC of Godavari water flows into the sea every year. Nara Lokesh suggested that some of this water will be diverted to be used for the massive Vizag data centre projects.
Visakhapatnam MP Bharat Mathukumilli has also said that Godavari water flowing into the sea will be diverted to the data centres through the Polavaram irrigation project.
As per the Environmental Clearances (ECS) given to two of the three Google Adani data centre parks with a combined capacity of 1 GW, their daily water requirement is around 500 kilolitres. Annually, it is around 1.8 lakh kilolitres. The ECs granted to the Tarluwada and Rambilli data centre parks mention the source of water as the state’s Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Department.
Nara Lokesh said that the state government intends to build data centres with a capacity of 6.5 GW, which would require about 1 TMC of water annually.
“In comparison, a 1 GW thermal plant consumes seven times more water than a 1GW data centre,” Lokesh said.
The Polavaram project, which the government says will be completed in a year, is expected to have an annual irrigation potential of 10.80 lakh acres. It involves interlinking of Godavari and Krishna rivers to divert 80 TMC of water to Krishna basin.
It also aims to supply 23.44 TMC of water to industries and drinking water to Visakhapatnam, along with domestic water supply to 28.5 lakh people in 611 villages.
The combined power requirement of the two data centre parks is estimated to be around 1,626 MW, along with backup power of over 350 diesel generators with a total capacity of around 971.5 MW. While the source of power in the ECs is mentioned as the Transmission Corporation of Andhra Pradesh (APTRANSCO), the Andhra Pradesh government plans to give out discom licenses to private firms requiring more than 300 MW of power, according to reports.
“The fear-mongering around data centers needs to stop. AI and data centers are critical infrastructure for the modern economy, much like roads, ports, and power grids. The focus should be on building and scaling them sustainably. Drawing simplistic comparisons with other geographies without accounting for regional factors, water availability, and technological advancements leads to flawed conclusions,” Nara Lokesh said.
However, citizen groups and environmental activists from Vizag and across the country have questioned the choice of location and insufficient impact assessment of data centre projects of such an unprecedented scale along the coast of Andhra Pradesh.
Activists have also raised concerns over the hasty manner in which the ECs were issued at the state government level, by classifying data centres as construction projects which allows it to bypass public hearings and a rigorous environmental impact assessment conducted by the Union government. The data centre sites’ proximity to the Kambalakonda wildlife sanctuary warrants reclassification of the project and more scrutiny, they have demanded.
Opposition to the Vizag data centre projects has been growing on social media, as reports from the United States and other parts of the world show groundwater contamination and other forms of environmental damage that make life difficult for residents in surrounding areas.
Lokesh also said that it was important for youngsters opposed to data centres to have a “voice at the table” because it affects their future. He said that Visakhapatnam MP Bharat was having conversations with such youngsters to understand their fears and work on “zoning or anything that needs to be further fine tuned.”
However, in the past two weeks, viral social media posts criticising the data centre projects have faced censorship. Instagram had restricted a story by the Environmental Reporting Collective (ERC)—an international network of journalists—which spoke about the alleged forced displacement of Dalits to accommodate the data centre project.
More recently, Instagram restricted two posts by the civil rights organisation Human Rights Forum (HRF) alleging large-scale hill cutting and deforestation for the data centres “with little transparency, zero public consultation and serious unanswered environmental questions.”
HRF said the Andhra Pradesh police had written to X Corp asking to take down HRF’s posts claiming that they violated Indian law.