“These big companies think they can enter small villages like ours, take our land, and destroy it.”
- Microsoft is building a data center in Mekaguda, a village in the southern Indian state of Telangana, which is expected to start operations by 2025. About 70% of the construction has been completed.
- Last month, the state government intervened after Microsoft cited problems with the local village council.
- A group of local residents has filed a petition against Microsoft, claiming encroachment and the dumping of industrial waste in a nearby body of water. The court hearing for the petition is pending.
Addition: Why are E-Waste Strategies in Need for Sustainable Data Centers?
E-waste in data centers encompasses a wide array of discarded IT equipment such as servers, power distribution units, and other electronic components that are no longer in use. Despite the rapid pace of technological upgrades, the alarming statistic from the UN forecasts that e-waste volumes could reach 74.7 metric tons globally by 2030.
Microsoft is still who vetted and hired the contractor and who selected the location.
And yeah. Past CEOs of Microsoft have continued to be shitty. They’re who’s responsible for what’s going on. I just wanted to talk about the ways white knight philanthropy doesn’t help, it just perpetuates colonialism, and Bill Gates+Microsoft have always been in lock step in this regard.
The point is the true villain here is colonialism
When you get and hire a plumber, do you check their criminal history? It’s ridiculous to expect Microsoft to act like the police or government to choose who does and doesn’t comply with laws. They’re not going to hire private investigators to check for crimes, that’s not their job.
Microsoft did pick the location, and as far as I can read, the permits have been signed. Attempts to block construction didn’t pass court, implying that either the local council doesn’t decide over what gets built there or the paperwork is in place.
You’re right, Bill Gates is spending billions on fighting malaria because deep in his heart he wants to bring the Congo back under white control. Lmao. Rich people giving away money for tax and image purposes is mostly just that, with a bit of a “I’m helping the world” mindset attached to it. As long as we acknowledge that, I can only see net positives in the charity work. This isn’t the “let’s dump a bunch of money near corrupt warlords” or “let’s kill the local fabric industry by sending our old clothes to a poor country” charity, this is R&D and free mass produced measures, available for cheap in any western country but unaffordable for poor nations, that could never have been produced locally.
Ridiculous. India is no longer a colony and even before that it wasn’t an American colony. Making Microsoft responsible for Indian politics, environmental agencies, and law enforcement is literally pulling the power away from the people and placing it with a foreign corporation. Microsoft taking on governmental responsibilities is the closest thing to colonialism they can possibly pull.
India should show that they don’t need a colonial power to instruct them how to control their country and figure this shit out, from local councils to the national government. Infantilisation of ex-colonies is part of the colonial mindset.
Microsoft pulled the same shit here. They lobbied at the national and provincial government, the locals protested but lost, they tried to block construction through environmental concerns (some kind of rare bird or beetle I believe), and this all failed. The reason? The previous elected local and provincial council agreed and signed all the paperwork before people found out what was happening. Does this mean Bill Gates is trying to colonise the Netherlands? No, this just means our politicians are corrupt and the legal instruments to protect the people are lacking. If it weren’t Microsoft, it could’ve been a supermarket distribution center, or a greenhouse, or anything else. The problem is systemic and the solution lies within the political system, not by being angry at the first company that figures out there’s some affordable land somewhere.