The chemical plant Italy shut down. The pesticide Britain banned. The data centre American towns are fighting off. All three have a home in India — and the welcome mat is out. On August 6, 2026, Rajya Sabha MP Sudha Murty asked the government whether AI data centres require specific environmental clearance before construction. In response, Minister of State Kirti Vardhan Singh clarified that standalone facilities do not need separate clearance under the current EIA Notification, instead falling under standard building construction thresholds and state pollution board regulations.

A rider followed, as if on second thought: data centres above a certain size would need clearance from the state government. Even so, India has no dedicated clearance regime for facilities that can draw as much electricity as a mid-sized city. On paper, a server farm is still treated like a garment unit or a cement plant.
That approach would be easier to defend if the rest of the world were moving the same way. It is not. In the very week Parliament was told data centres are just another industry, American states were tightening their rules. New York's State Senator Liz Krueger and Assembly member Anna Kelles introduced a bill, not yet law, that would freeze new data centre permits for three years while the state studies the strain on its grid and household bills. Texas's grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, has begun revisiting data centre connections it had already approved, unsure the system can absorb them. In California, Monterey Park extended a moratorium on data centre applications and put a proposal to ban them outright before voters in a June 2026 ballot, after residents packed council meetings over a planned 250,000-square-foot facility that would have drawn more power than every household in the city combined; the developer withdrew before the vote. Wisconsin, Louisiana and Indiana have proposed similar pauses, per the watchdog group Good Jobs First. None of this adds up to a nationwide ban, but the direction is unmistakable: hearings, caution, and local communities insisting on a say.
India has gone the other way, and the scale is worth sitting with. In October 2025, Google announced its largest AI investment outside the United States: a gigawatt-scale data centre campus in Visakhapatnam, developed with the Adani Group's AdaniConneX. The figure has been put at $10 billion, or $15 billion counting the full build-out to 2030. Andhra Pradesh calls the project transformative, part of its ambition to turn Visakhapatnam into an "AI City." Left out is the other side of the ledger: a single such facility draws roughly as much power as a large city's homes and industry combined, in a state where power planning has rarely had room to spare. Industry trackers, including Research And Markets' 2025 studies, project India's data centre power capacity roughly tripling by 2030, concentrated in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Telangana — which will have to find that power on a timetable set by corporate schedules, not their own grid planners.
None of this makes data centres uniquely villainous. Every industrial facility uses land, power and water, and leaves a footprint that must be managed, not wished away. The case for wanting Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Indian conglomerates to build here rather than in Malaysia or Vietnam is real. What goes missing is that a data centre, once built, employs few people to run it; that the "digital economy" jobs boom is mostly temporary construction work; and that the states competing hardest — Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh — are also where households cannot yet count on reliable power.
Data centres are simply the newest face of a much older pattern. For decades, industries that fall out of favour in wealthier countries, because environmental laws tightened or courts stopped looking away, have found a second life in India. The clearest recent example is a chemical plant in Vicenza, Italy. Miteni, a maker of PFAS "forever chemicals" that do not break down in the environment, was shut after its pollution was linked to contaminated drinking water for more than 350,000 people in the Veneto region; an Italian court convicted its former executives of environmental disaster in 2024. As Per the Deccan Herald, the plant's decommissioned machinery was bought by Mumbai-based Laxmi Organic Industries, through its subsidiary Viva Lifesciences, and shipped to Lote Parashuram in Maharashtra's Ratnagiri district, near the Koyna Wildlife Sanctuary, where production resumed in 2023. Dow Chemical, meanwhile, has been dismantling polymer lines in Germany that European regulators no longer welcome. Maharashtra's environment department says Lote holds the consents it needs, and there is no claim the project is unlawful. But the pattern is hard to miss: what a democracy with strict courts and organised citizens no longer tolerates at home, it can often still sell elsewhere.
The same logic shapes India's use of pesticides other countries have abandoned. Glyphosate, the world's most widely used weedkiller, was classified in 2015 by the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer as "probably carcinogenic to humans" — disputed by its manufacturer but the trigger for tens of thousands of US lawsuits — yet it remains in wide use in Indian agriculture and, reportedly, in some municipal lake-cleaning operations. Paraquat, so toxic that a small accidental swallow can kill and for which no antidote exists, has been withdrawn in dozens of countries, including Switzerland and the UK, since the 1980s; it is still sold and sprayed in India. Chlorpyrifos, linked to neurodevelopmental harm in children, remains in Indian use even where other jurisdictions have banned it. This is not neglect — committees have recommended safer packaging, applicator training and, in some states, outright bans. But telling a labourer to spray a chemical with no antidote, in gear he cannot afford, is not caution. It is regulation's appearance without its substance.
Even food on children's plates carries a version of this double standard. A 2024 investigation by Swiss watchdog Public Eye found that Nestlé's Cerelac baby-cereal products sold in Switzerland, Germany and the UK carry no added sugar, while the same brand sold in India, its single largest Cerelac market, contained an average of nearly three grams of added sugar per serving across all fifteen products tested — a figure the company had itself disclosed on its packaging. Nestlé told Reuters it complies fully with Indian food-safety rules and has cut added sugars in its infant-cereal range by up to 30% over five years; India's Food Safety and Standards Authority said it would examine the findings. Both can be true at once: the company operating within Indian law, and Indian law still setting a lower bar for its youngest citizens than European law sets for its own.
What connects a hyperscale data centre in Visakhapatnam, a relocated Italian chemical plant in Ratnagiri, a herbicide banned in Zurich but sprayed in Punjab, and a baby-food recipe that changes at the border is not a conspiracy. It is a series of decisions, made separately by different regulators and companies, that keep arriving at the same answer: India will absorb what wealthier markets increasingly will not. Sometimes that is a fair trade for jobs and investment. Often, on closer inspection, the jobs are fewer than promised, the investment terms are opaque, and the people bearing the cost — in depleted water tables, a farmworker's health, a toddler's daily sugar intake — have no seat at the table where these deals are struck.
None of this is an argument against artificial intelligence, or against investment in the infrastructure it needs. It is an argument for treating that infrastructure, and every industry that arrives with similar promises, as what it actually is: a set of trade-offs deserving the scrutiny residents of Monterey Park or lawmakers in Albany have insisted on for themselves. If a facility would be required to draw clean power, keep its distance from residential areas, and answer to an environmental review at home, there is no honest reason it should face an easier test here. Ease of doing business should not be shorthand for the absence of a business's obligations to its neighbours. The real question is not whether India wants the investment. It is what kind of country agrees to be the place where the rules run out.

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