In this episode of Interpreting India, Charukeshi Bhatt speaks with Jane Munga, fellow with the Africa Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, on the subsea cable landscape in Africa. With the continent now home to around 77 submarine cables and one of the fastest growing AI infrastructure markets in the world, the conversation moves beyond the headline investment numbers to ask harder questions: who benefits, who governs, and what does resilience actually look like when the cables go down?
Invalid video URL
In this episode of Interpreting India, Charukeshi Bhatt speaks with Jane Munga, fellow with the Africa Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, on the subsea cable landscape in Africa. With the continent now home to around 77 submarine cables and one of the fastest growing AI infrastructure markets in the world, the conversation moves beyond the headline investment numbers to ask harder questions: who benefits, who governs, and what does resilience actually look like when the cables go down?
This episode explores:
Jane opens with a framing that runs through the entire conversation: for Africa, the subsea cable story is not primarily about geopolitics. It is about connecting citizens and translating that connectivity into economic participation. Less than 40% of Africans use the internet, and while infrastructure investments are significant, the benefits tend to concentrate in urban hubs like Nairobi, Lagos, and Cape Town, while rural populations, women, and landlocked countries remain underserved. The 2024 cable cut that affected ten African countries brought into sharp focus just how fragile the system is. Africa has only one dedicated cable repair vessel for the entire continent, and mobilizing it costs millions of dollars and takes days. Jane walks through what is now being put in place: clearer government notification protocols, mandated interconnection between telecom operators, and cross-border coordination frameworks, with West Africa emerging as a model that the rest of the continent has not yet replicated.
On Chinese infrastructure, Jane is pragmatic. The framing of east versus west is, in her view, the wrong one for African policymakers who are already deeply invested in Chinese telecom towers, terrestrial fiber, and mobile devices across the continent. The more useful question is how to secure what already exists, ensuring cybersecurity safeguards are in place regardless of where the infrastructure comes from. On the ITU advisory body, whose final report was published in Geneva in July, the recommendations cover coordination, standards, and geographic diversity, but the document is non-binding. The real work, she says, now rests with national governments and regulators to take those recommendations forward.
Carnegie India does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.
In this episode of Interpreting India, Shruti Mittal, research analyst at Carnegie India, speaks with Professor Mohan Yellishetty of Monash University on the India-Australia critical minerals partnership, what it has delivered so far, and where the two countries can build the most meaningful cooperation over the next decade.
Shruti Mittal, Mohan Yellishetty
In this episode of Interpreting India, Konark Bhandari, speaks with Edward Fishman, author of Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, on economic statecraft, how the U.S. built its playbook for economic warfare over time, and what the lessons are for India as it looks to build its own economic resilience.
Konark Bhandari, Edward Fishman
In this episode of Interpreting India, Nidhi Singh, speaks with Debjani Ghosh, distinguished fellow at NITI Aayog and chief architect of the NITI Frontier Tech Hub. With nearly three decades across Intel, NASSCOM, and now NITI Aayog, Debjani brings a perspective that is both deeply practical and genuinely optimistic. She co-chaired the working group on AI for Economic Growth and Social Good at the India AI Impact Summit, and in this conversation she reflects on what the summit delivered, what India's AI journey needs to get right, and why the human being has to stay at the center of all of it.
Nidhi Singh, Debjani Ghosh
In this episode of Interpreting India, Nidhi Singh, speaks with Professor Balaraman Ravindran, Head of the Department of Data Science and AI at IIT Madras, and Co-Chair of the Safe and Trusted AI Working Group at the India AI Impact Summit. Since the summit, Professor Ravindran has also been appointed to the UN's Independent International Scientific Panel on AI. There is a narrative that has taken hold since the summit, that India moved away from safety and left frontier risks behind. This conversation sets the record straight.
Nidhi Singh, Balaraman Ravindran
In this episode of Interpreting India, Charukeshi Bhatt speaks with Pooja Bhatt, associate professor, Jindal School of International Affairs, O.P. Jindal University, on a piece of infrastructure that is easy to overlook and very difficult to protect: subsea cables. Stretching over 1.5 million kilometres across ocean floors and carrying nearly 99% of global data traffic, these cables underpin everything from financial systems and cloud infrastructure to the everyday digital services that billions of people rely on. For India, a fast-growing digital economy with expanding data center ambitions, getting this right is not optional.
Charukeshi Bhatt, Pooja Bhatt
