Congress Criticizes Maharashtra Data-Centre Push Following Drought Declaration

The Maharashtra government is pushing massive data-centre expansion while the state reels under a declared drought caused by rainfall deficit (The Hindu, Indian Express). These facilities consume millions of litres of water daily for cooling in a region where farmers are watching crops fail and drinking water is being rationed. Prioritising server farms over survival needs is a policy choice, not an inevitability.

The Congress argument treats water allocation as a zero-sum choice between server racks and farmland, but Maharashtra's policy explicitly mandates recycled and desalinated water for industrial cooling so that potable supply remains untouched (The Hindu). Data centres also anchor the digital infrastructure that enables precision agriculture, real-time reservoir monitoring, and direct benefit transfers — tools the state is already using to target drought relief more efficiently (Indian Express). Halting that investment would shrink the fiscal space needed for long-term water-security projects such as the Marathwada grid and micro-irrigation subsidies.

The government claims its policy protects potable water by mandating recycled and desalinated supply for data centres, but the Hindu report on the drought declaration makes no mention of any such segregated infrastructure being operational at scale in the affected regions. Desalination plants on the Konkan coast do not pipe water to inland server farms in drought-hit districts, and recycled-water networks for industrial cooling remain pilot projects, not a statewide reality. Meanwhile, the government's own digital-tools argument concedes the point: precision agriculture and reservoir monitoring require functioning water bodies to monitor, not server racks that evaporate millions of litres daily while farmers watch canals run dry.

The Congress rebuttal demands that every recycled-water pipeline be fully commissioned before a single data centre operates, a standard no infrastructure programme in India has ever met; the Marathwada grid itself was built in phases while villages still relied on tankers. The state's policy does not claim the network is complete — it mandates the condition for new approvals, and the first tranche of projects under that mandate is already using treated sewage from municipal plants in the Mumbai-Pune corridor, not potable allocations. Halting those approvals now would forfeit the capital and the digital backbone that funds the next phase of the very water-security works the opposition says it wants.