"Each day, Kiran Kasbe drives a rickshaw taxi through his home neighbourhood of Mahul on Mumbai's eastern seafront, down streets lined with stalls selling tomatoes, bottle gourds and auberginesand, frequently, through thick smog. Earlier this year, doctors found three tumours in his 54-year-old mother's brain. It's not clear exactly what caused her cancer. But people who live near coal plants are much more likely to develop the illness, studies show, and the residents of Mahul live a few hundred metres down the road from one."
"But an investigation by SourceMaterial and the Guardian reveals the biggest single factor in the city's failure to end its dependence on fossil fuels: energy-hungry datacentres. Leaked records also reveal the scale of the presence of the world's biggest datacentre operator, Amazon, in Mumbai. In the city's metropolitan area, Amazon, on its website, records three availability zones, which it defines as one or more datacentres. Leaked records from last year seen by SourceMaterial from inside Amazon reveal the company used 16 in the city."
Mumbai's Mahul neighbourhood experiences severe air pollution from nearby coal-fired power plants, producing visible smog and foul odours. Residents report serious health problems, including cancers, with proximity to coal plants linked to higher disease risk. Two coal plants run by Tata and Adani were scheduled to close but closures were reversed in late 2023 on grounds of rising electricity demand. Rapid economic growth, extreme-heat-driven air conditioning, and an expanding datacentre industry are driving India's electricity consumption. Amazon's large datacentre presence in Mumbai, documented in leaked records, has contributed significantly to local power needs, complicating efforts to reduce fossil-fuel dependence.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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