The Environmental Cost of AI: What Should India Do?

As artificial intelligence reshapes economies and geopolitics, its hidden environmental footprint—in energy, water, and materials—has emerged as an uncomfortable truth. For India, positioning itself as a rising AI power while honouring its climate commitments requires not just ambition, but a deliberate strategy of reconciliation.

Understanding the Environmental Burden

Training and deploying large AI models demand intensive computational power, driving up electricity consumption that, in India's case, remains substantially coal-dependent.
Data centres also consume enormous freshwater volumes for cooling, a pressing concern for a water-stressed country.
Compounding this, frequent hardware upgrades generate mounting e-waste, testing India's limited recycling capacity.

Policy Pathways for India

India can address this through the following measures:

First, mandating energy-efficiency standards for data centres and incentivizing their location near renewable energy sources.
Second, promoting frugal, domain-specific AI models tailored to Indian needs, reducing dependence on resource-heavy foreign systems.
Third, strengthening e-waste management frameworks through extended producer responsibility.
Fourth, embedding sustainability audits within the IndiaAI Mission to ensure growth doesn't outpace ecological accountability.

Institutional and Global Alignment

India must also engage in multilateral dialogues on responsible AI, advocating for standardized environmental disclosures from global tech firms operating domestically, while leveraging its G20 and climate leadership to shape equitable norms.

Conclusion

India's response to AI's ecological cost will define whether it becomes a model of sustainable innovation or merely replicates existing excesses; this makes the ‘green-by-design’ policy not optional, but essential.