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The trend of working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic has brought unexpected benefits to India's largest IT services company.

Since April 2020, almost all employees have been working remotely, and the absolute carbon footprint of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has been reduced by 49% compared to last year. Now, the company is ready to reduce absolute greenhouse gas emissions by 70% by 2025 (using 2016 as the base year). By 2030, the company hopes to become a net zero emitter of greenhouse gases.

TCS earlier stated that by 2025, only 25% of employees will need to come to the office at any given time.

"The good news is that there is enough technology to work remotely. More importantly, customers can trust us," Girish Ramachandran, president of TCS Asia Pacific, told Quartz. “As a result, office space is rationalized, energy-saving and commuting time is reduced.” 

Scientists have argued time and time again that reducing man-made greenhouse gases is essential to combat climate change. Net zero emissions means that even if emissions continue to exist, they will be balanced by absorbing the same amount from the atmosphere.

Today, nearly 16% of TCS's total energy consumption comes from renewable energy sources.

Given its size and scale, this behemoth’s focus on sustainability is key. TCS has operations in 46 countries/regions and its number of employees reaches 500,000.

The motivation for TCS to focus on the environment comes from its "young and very diverse" workforce. "If you look at the upcoming millennials—45% of the world’s population today are millennials—they choose companies or products based on the sustainability of the company or product," Ramachandran said.

The IT company’s strategy to reduce its carbon footprint includes steps such as relying more on renewable energy, optimizing business-related air travel and employee commuting, and focusing on energy optimization across operations.

In the past fifteen years, TCS has been committed to improving resource utilization and curbing waste. In the past, the company added several green buildings to its real estate portfolio and upgraded its legacy equipment. The company’s Seruseri Park in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu is the largest IT facility in Asia. It covers an area of ​​70 acres and has a construction area of ​​more than 5 million square feet. It is a "gold" green building (certified by LEED) and has a water body. , Landscaped garden, a lot of green plants and a solar panel to generate electricity.

In addition, TCS has identified two key markets and two delivery centers for carbon neutrality within this year.

“We have been doing a lot of things to move towards a more sustainable future,” Ramachandran said, referring to campuses that already have rainwater harvesting, 100% wastewater treatment and recycling, and paper recycling. Even food waste is used to feed the biodiversity of the campus.

TCS is committed to being responsible for the environment, which allows it to try and test new technology solutions that can be provided to customers and help expand their business.

Take the company's internal solution as an example. This solution is used to monitor the energy usage of all its parks. CEO Rajesh Gopinath took the lead in adopting this solution when he was the company's chief financial officer. A team from the Kochi Control Center in India monitors more than 100 TCS offices around the clock, and detects anomalies and anomalies in energy consumption based on machine learning algorithms and triggers quick corrective actions.

Among other things, the solution allows the company to use heat map data to adjust the air conditioning temperature in the office. These small efforts add up to save the company tens of millions of rupees each year while reducing wasteful energy consumption.

TCS now sells this hacking technique to customers in all walks of life. And this is just one of many examples. The company provides more than one hundred solutions to help customers navigate their sustainability journey.

Last year, TCS held a "Sustainathon" in Singapore, which is a hackathon focused on sustainable development. It is launching the event worldwide. The idea is to equip talents with the ability to think sustainably throughout their careers.

Ramachandran said that in India, green energy procurement is still a huge challenge. The department’s policies and regulations are far from complete, and labor and infrastructure are lacking. The country mainly relies on international equipment and technology suppliers.

India is an ideal country for solar energy and has consistently turned to this renewable energy source. But it still only accounts for 4% of the country's electricity generation. Ramachandran said the technology "still needs to be developed." "The output of solar energy is not that big. There is still a lot of work to be done in the semiconductor field."

In addition, the use of renewable energy to achieve its net zero emission target is only the beginning of TCS. In the future, the company will even focus on carbon positivity. Then, work needs to be done to achieve each of the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Ramachandran said that in 10 years, the Sustainable Development Goals will become something else.

"I don't want to call net zero emissions a goal. This is a journey and we need to continue to evolve," he concluded. "As India's largest employer, we need to lead this special journey."

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