Pratap Mane, President and Country Head – India, Colt DCS
With over four decades of experience building large-scale, mission-critical infrastructure across India, Pratap Mane has held senior leadership roles at global banks including J.P. Morgan, Deutsche Bank and Barclays; led infrastructure and real estate functions at Bharti Televentures and Airtel Business; and helped establish the Yondr Group’s India data centre platform. As president and country head of Colt Data Centre Services (Colt DCS), he is now focused on expanding hyperscale and artificial intelligence (AI)-ready capacity aligned with global standards for design, sustainability and operational reliability.
Since joining Colt DCS in December 2022, Mane has overseen the launch of Phase 1 of the Mumbai campus in September 2023 and structured a joint venture with RMZ to develop more than 250 MW of AI-ready hyperscale capacity across Mumbai and Chennai. He also serves as chair of the Data Centre Committee for the Western Region at the Confederation of Indian Industry.
The structural challenges before him are considerable, spanning extreme power demand from AI workloads and rising rack densities; a shortage of specialised talent across operations, design and engineering; and growing regulatory complexity around data protection and resilience. Yet Mane is clear-eyed about the opportunity. “Explosive AI-led demand is accelerating the need for high-density, AI-ready data centre campuses,” he says.
On broader trends, Mane points to the convergence of AI and evolving regulatory frameworks as the central force reshaping the data sector. Agentic AI is driving exponential growth in data volumes and compute-intensive workloads, pushing architectures toward low-latency, distributed environments. Data sovereignty, cyber-resilience and sustainability are simultaneously becoming mission-critical priorities, while advances in analytics and automation continue to reshape specialised roles across the industry.
His key strengths include combining strategic thinking with execution discipline, translating market opportunities into scalable infrastructure platforms and maintaining a global outlook while remaining closely attuned to India’s complex local market dynamics.
Mane holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Mumbai and a master of corporate real estate certification from CoreNet Global in Atlanta. He is a member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. Outside work, he enjoys music and travel. His wife is a former teacher and his son works in the renewable energy sector in New York.
