Enhancement of Disaster Resilience of Critical Infrastructure Relevant to India’s Undersea Communications Cables

Commodore Debesh Lahiri (Retd) 
Senior Fellow & Former Executive Director
National Maritime Foundation

Soham Agarwal
Associate Fellow, National Maritime Foundation 

Undersea communication cables and their associated infrastructure such as cable landing stations and beach manholes constitute critical infrastructure.  Yet, they are highly vulnerable to the increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters and hazards. Extant generic building codes/standards and disaster protocols are inadequate for critical cable landing infrastructure especially given the exponentially increasing adverse impact of climate change. This study seeks to conduct a contextualised disaster threat-assessment to cable landing infrastructure in four Indian cities viz., Mumbai, Chennai, Port Blair, and Digha, and create a policy framework incorporating disaster-resilience at the design/building stage of undersea cable landing-infrastructure through customised building codes/standards.