Taxing The Digital Thirst: A Critical Analysis Of India’s Green Taxation Framework And The Necessity Of An Anticipatory Model
- IJLLR Journal
- Jun 13
- 2 min read
Manya Ati, Amity University Gwalior [M.P]
ABSTRACT
India’s approach to environmental taxation has been, almost without exception, a response to harms already done. The levies it has tried are the cess on coal, the age-based charge on out of date vehicles, the compensation cess that has replaced earlier taxes and is working as a cess on carbon price, attached to forms of pollution whose damage was visible, established, and in most cases decades old. This paper argues that such a framework, reactive by habit and by design, is poorly suited to the harm that is now gathering at the country’s digital frontier. The rapid construction of data centres, drawn to India by the ambitions of an artificial-intelligence economy, is creating a new and concentrated demand upon two resources the country can least afford to waste firstly freshwater and then electricity. The harm is not yet large in the aggregate, but it is growing quickly, it is concentrated in regions already under water stress, and most importantly it is foreseeable. Drawing on the recent literature documenting the resource footprint of India’s data- centre boom, on the history and recent unravelling of the country’s green-tax instruments, and on the precautionary and polluter-pays principles that the Supreme Court has woven into Indian environmental law, the paper contends that the reactive model has reached the limit of its usefulness, and that the moment calls for an anticipatory model: a fiscal instrument calibrated to a foreseeable harm before that harm matures, designed to shape the siting and the resource intensity of digital infrastructure while it is still being built. The argument is offered not as a call for a new burden upon a nascent industry but as a plea for the right kind of discipline applied at the right time.
Keywords: green taxation; environmental fiscal policy; Pigouvian tax; data centres; water stress; precautionary principle; polluter pays; anticipatory regulation; carbon pricing; India.
