India Inc Still Not Up To Speed With Climate Action

Companies need to look far beyond renewable energy and water conservation, says M Ramesh

Every year, since 2001, a not-forprofit body called CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project) sends questionnaires to thousands of companies seeking information on how they measure and mitigate their environment impact and carbon footprint. The idea is to nudge companies to do so. Globally, over 8,400 companies disclosed information through CDP in 2019.

In India, the activity began only in 2012 and in 2019 CDP India sent questionnaires to the top 200 listed companies — top in terms of market capitalisation.

Only 59 of them responded. Following its gentle-nudge approach, CDP India does not express disappointment but celebrates the fact that the number of respondents was up 13 per cent over the previous year.

Yet, the data from the dipstick survey vindicates something that is generally known: Corporate India is still not up to speed with climate change.

Informal chats that BusinessLine has had with several companies have shown that to most companies ‘climate action’ is all about buying more of renewable energy, and conserving power and water; there is little awareness of the benefits of going beyond just buying more of wind and solar-derived electricity.

For sure, more and more Indian companies are increasingly aware of global warming. Chandrajit Banerjee, DirectorGeneral, Confederation of Indian Industry, says that since the Paris Agreement of 2015, “we are seeing a multitude of actions by Indian industry in terms of adopting clean energy, achieving higher levels of energy efficiency and (electric) mobility”. But, as a careful reading of the CDP India report shows, corporate climate action is confined to a bunch of outliers — groups such as the Tatas, the Mahindras, L&T; IT majors like Infosys and Wipro and even some medium scale companies (MSMEs) like Velmurugan Industries of Tiruchi. Broad-based action is largely missing.