Recently, Maharashtra was busy marketing itself as India’s next big data-centre hub in the country. At the same time, it is allowing the destruction of more than 45,000 mangrove forests that stand between its cities and the sea. This is not a coincidence of timing. The state is expanding data centres in a way that requires clearing the very forests that protect the coast from floods and storms, and calling it development. This is negligence with a predictable bill in human lives, particularly of coastal residents, and only later, if at all, in the industry it was cleared for.Take what’s happening currently in Assam: since this July, large parts of the state are yet again witnessing devastating floods with the death toll rising to 68 and affecting over 6.5 lakh people. Reporting on the current floods states that the reason for this is shrinking buffers like Deepor Beel, a wetland near Guwahati, and failing embankments along the Brahmaputra basin, where flood control is still treated as sandbags, along with ad hoc repairs rather than serious protection of the natural ecosystem. Assam is not flooding only because of heavy rain, but also because the state and the Union governments have long treated nature’s first line of defence – the wetlands, floodplains and forests – as expendable, weakening the buffers that could have otherwise absorbed part of the excess water.Maharashtra is now walking the same path, but with coastal mangroves and a denser concentration of assets at risk. Mangroves are coastal guardians. Global studies estimate that mangrove forests prevent more than 15 million people from being flooded every year and avoid over USD 65 billion in annual flood damage. Field and modelling work further show how their dense root networks cut wave heights, slow storm surges and reduce inundation depth inland, especially where there are no seawalls. In other words, every cleared mangrove stand is one less strip of living flood infrastructure.The costs of clearing these forests are not hypothetical. India has already lost roughly 40% of its mangrove cover over the last century, and recent Mumbai floods have prompted repeated warnings from experts and local activists about the consequences. Yet, the state continues to push through projects that cut precisely the forests that cushion Mumbai, Navi Mumbai and surrounding creeks. In December, the Bombay high court cleared the Versova-Bhayandar Development Plan road. The project will affect over 45,000 mangrove trees in Mumbai, despite years of evidence that these trees protect adjacent villages and urban neighbourhoods from tidal flooding. Earlier orders have allowed hundreds more mangroves to be cut for a 132 kilovolt power transmission line tied to the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project.Meanwhile, Maharashtra is ominously also selling itself as the country’s premier data-centre state. New reports have described plans worth around Rs 16 lakh crore to turn the Mumbai Metropolitan Region into a leading data-centre hub, backed by accelerated clearances, reducing the mandatory green energy requirement from 100% to 51%, and relaxed environmental conditions for large parks. The state now holds a top share of India’s existing data-centre stock and is expanding “green integrated data centre parks” while raising project limits from three to 20 sites in and around Mumbai and Navi Mumbai. The same coastal districts are already prone to heavy monsoon rainfall and urban flooding, often beside creeks that were once covered in mangrove. All this despite the multiple flood warnings that exist in the city. Also read: Amid Protests by Locals, Foreign Funding For Data Centres in India DeclineWe are not here to call for an end to digital infrastructure. However, Maharashtra’s data-centre push is built on weak environmental safeguards and a heavy local burden. These parks demand land, power and water in already stressed coastal districts, while the benefits accrue mainly to distant companies and users. When that expansion is paired with the mangrove clearance, the costs fall heavily, first on slum residents, informal workers and fishing communities who constitute more than half of Mumbai’s population and who cannot afford flood-proof homes or relocation, and nor is the state providing sufficient compensation or homes.The contradiction is stark. On one hand, Maharashtra promises world-class digital infrastructure. On the other, it is dismantling the ecological systems that help keep that infrastructure dry. While flood-risk maps and new atlases mark blue and red zones along rivers and coasts, the state’s response to it has been to order fresh flood-line surveys to ease their redevelopment hurdles for existing buildings, instead of freezing the clearance of mangroves in those zones. Instead of tightening protections around natural buffers, officials are continuously treating flood-lines as negotiable obstacles to construction.For data centres, this is more than an environmental problem, it is a direct operational and economic risk. A large coastal data-centre park is full of sensitive hardware that cannot get wet. Flooding does not just damage servers; it brings down services that millions of people rely on for banking, communications, logistics and emergency response. Developers talk about redundant power supply and renewable energy targets, but they rarely mention exposure to storm surge or tidal flooding. A “green” label attached to a data-centre cluster built beside a degraded mangrove creek is, at best, incomplete and, at worst, misleading.There is no technical reason this clash has to exist. Research on mangrove restoration shows that protecting and rebuilding coastal forests is among the most cost-effective ways to reduce flood risk for nearby communities and infrastructure. Maharashtra’s own experience in villages like Aware, Jui and Dighode, where communities are bringing mangroves back after rapid development destroyed them, illustrates how quickly the benefits can return in terms of reduced erosion and more stable shorelines. An honest data-centre policy would begin with a simple rule: no clearance of critical mangrove stands in high-risk coastal zones, and mandatory mapping of remaining forests into site selection.Instead, the state is drifting in the opposite direction. Orders allowing large-scale cutting send a message that mangroves are negotiable when they are not. Once the message is out, every new project like road, rail, transmission corridor, data-centre park, will seek its own “exception”, and the state will ease clearance by seeing the millions of dollars invested. The cumulative effect will be felt when a future monsoon, powered by warmer seas, pushes a storm surge into creeks stripped of their trees and straight towards the glass and concrete blocks of Maharashtra’s digital economy. That is a multi-fold real economic loss. Assam has already shown what happens when natural buffers are treated as expendable. Maharashtra has more to lose: the homes of its coastal residents, business and the servers that carry the country’s data. If the state continues to chop mangroves around Mumbai and Navi Mumbai while expanding flood-exposed data-centre clusters, it is not planning for the future; but setting itself up for a flood-driven blackout of its own making.David Sathuluri is the founder and co-director, Laboratory of AI, Climate and Society, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, New York City. Ajmal Khan A.T is an assistant professor, Shiv Nadar University, Delhi-NCR.