Green AI: Innovation Versus Precaution And India’s Environmental Jurisprudence Gap
Neelakshi, Advocate, LL.M. (IPR)
ABSTRACT
India is building world’s largest AI infrastructure; over 38,000 GPUs under the IndiaAI Mission, Data Centres expanding across the country and Draft Data Centre Policy 2025 offering 20 years tax holidays. Yet the environmental cost of this expansion is being overlooked. IndiaAI Mission is silent on the emissions and energy use. The DDCP, 2025 imposes no mandatory Environmental Impact Assessment and makes renewable energy sourcing voluntary.
This article argues that India’s AI Governance Guidelines are incoherent; these guidelines have explicitly adopted ‘Innovation over restraint’ as a governing principle. But in India Precautionary Principle is not mere policy option rather it is an established law of the land. Rooted in German jurisprudence, the Precautionary Principle was firmly established in Vellore (1996) by the Supreme Court of India and given statutory force under National Green Tribunal Act, 2010 and reaffirmed as a fundamental right under Article 21as a right to healthy environment extended to right against adverse climate change in MK Ranjitsinh (2024).
This article identifies two gaps. That there are no mandatory environmental impact assessment for data centres and absence of cross-ministerial alignment with India’s climate commitments. It proposes corrective measures using the existing legal mechanisms; an EPA Section 3 Notification and NDC compliance clause in the Draft Data Centre Policy.
Keywords: Green AI, Precautionary Principle, Environmental Jurisprudence, Data Centre policy, IndiaAI Mission, Net Zero.
