Half the Country’s Power — and All the Questions

The day began at Adani Group’s cybersecurity centre, where we saw the machinery of digital defence up close — isolated servers subjected to simulated attacks, a small-scale replica of a working power station, and the control room from which the tests are watched. A staff member walked us through a simulation of the 2015 cyberattack on Ukraine’s power grid.

Then we stepped into the real thing: Adani’s control centre for its power grid, a single room from which the company’s entire energy portfolio across India is monitored and managed. The lesson was hard to miss — the corporate world shapes daily life on an enormous scale. Adani controls roughly half of India’s energy needs, and reaches into ports, airports and much more.

The company’s contribution to sustainability is undeniable — and the corporate field is extremely grey.

Many of us held both of those thoughts at once. Almost half of Adani’s portfolio is solar and wind; the other half leans on large-scale coal mining in Australia. Students raised the unethical labour used to build some solar plants, the disregard for regional biodiversity, and — inside the cybersecurity centre itself — the heavy use of AI-generated content where a person could have explained things, and the certainty with which our guide denied that Adani had ever been attacked. All of it fed a genuine debate about the power corporations hold in the modern world.

The day closed at Dada Hari’s stepwell. It felt a little rushed, and more than a few of us wished less of it had gone to group photos — but the structure, and the story behind it, were impressive and beautiful all the same. Cool, quiet and centuries old: a very different kind of engineering to end a day that began in a control room.