Lighting The Way

Saurabh Kumar has taken EESL from being a mere consultant to becoming one of the world’s biggest energy efficiency service providers

- Manu Balachandran

Saurabh Kumar still vividly remembers the time he took charge as managing director of Energy Efficiency Services Limited (EESL). After all, six years isn’t really a long time.

In 2013, the Noida-headquartered public sector company—with financial backing from NTPC Limited, Power Finance Corporation, Rural Electrification Corporation, and Power Grid Corporation of India—was hardly what it was meant to be, relegated mostly to the job of consulting and helping state governments prepare their action plans on saving energy. With annual revenues of 5 crore, and a corpus of 90 crore, EESL had barely made any strides in energy savings, a job it was tasked with when, in 2009, it was established as a joint venture between the four public sector companies.

“The focus was on doing things related to consultancy. There were lots of states that were preparing their action plans and they were getting budgets. We did audits on behalf of the Bureau of Energy Efficiency,” says Kumar, 50, an IIT-Kanpur alumnus and a former officer of the Indian Revenue Service (IRS). “But it was not what we were created for. EESL got equity of 90 crore, and we weren’t utilising that. So we took a conscious decision as management that we will now focus on project implementation.”

In the past six years, EESL has gone from simply being a consultancy to becoming one of the world’s biggest energy efficiency service providers. By their own assessment, they have led to a combined savings of over 20,000 crore in Asia’s third-largest economy.

From operational revenues of 3 crore in 2013, the company now expects over 2,500 crore in 2019, with profits of 100 crore.