Digital infrastructure in South Asia: China’s role and the potential for Australia–India cooperation

Australian Strategic Policy Institute | Shruti Jargad

Chinese entities under the Digital Silk Road initiative are expanding dominant footprints across South Asia's telecommunications, subsea fibre-optic networks, cloud services, and smart-city surveillance infrastructure. This rapid technological penetration creates severe long-term risks, including strategic dependence, vendor lock-in, unmitigated cybersecurity threats, and compromised national sovereignty for regional states facing limited alternative providers.

Limited local institutional capacity and financing constraints exacerbate these structural vulnerabilities by restricting technology choices for host nations. Dependency erodes regional digital autonomy. To counter this growing imbalance without demanding total technology decoupling, Australia and India are forging a pragmatic bilateral partnership focused on supply chain diversification and institutional resilience. India offers scalable digital public infrastructure models, while Australia provides robust cybersecurity governance, regulatory experience, and multilateral financing mechanisms. Expanding these practical avenues strengthens local capacity, ensuring South Asian states maintain secure, sovereign digital ecosystems.

Comment

Monopolisation of South Asian digital infrastructure under the Digital Silk Road embeds structural intelligence vulnerabilities into host-nation networks. When foundational telecommunications layers rely exclusively on Chinese vendors, telemetry and traffic routing remain exposed to covert data extraction. This reliance degrades sovereign communication security during crisis periods, long before formal hostilities manifest.

A downstream consequence is the implicit restriction placed on joint security cooperation with external partners. Regional defence networks reliant on compromised subsea cable landings struggle to achieve interoperability with allied protocols established under the Quad framework.

Strategic Question for Discussion

If Chinese entities maintain single-vendor dominance over South Asia's subsea cable landings under the Digital Silk Road, can Quad-aligned digital public infrastructure models offer a viable alternative without triggering severe network fragmentation?

The structural reality suggests that offering modular digital public infrastructure can mitigate software and payment dependencies, but cannot quickly offset established physical hardware control. Until alternative subsea cable landings and telecommunications financing mature, regional states will likely maintain hybrid digital architectures despite inherent security risks.

Share your assessment in the comments below.

To read in details click here