How India is moving towards net zero

More work to be done

Ensuring datacentres are sustainable is critical for organisations in India to achieve their carbon emissions targets.

“Datacentres are critical to the future of India and have always been looked down upon due to their excessive energy consumption and increasing carbon emissions,” said Keshav Kumar, general manager of datacentre presales at Rahi, a global systems integrator.

Citing research from commercial real estate services company JLL, Kumar said India’s datacentre capacity could double from 499MW in 2021 to 1GW by 2023, potentially enlarging the country’s carbon footprint if datacentres are not managed efficiently.

Michael Barnes, vice-president and research director at Forrester, noted the role that IT functions play in helping organisations reduce their datacentre carbon emissions.

“Optimising IT infrastructure and operations presents massive opportunities, including accelerating migration to cloud and optimising consumption with active hardware and software management,” he said.

To Ashish Agrawal, managing director of technology service provider Nagarro, the sustainability of IT infrastructure has been ignored for too long as IT services is traditionally not seen as a heavy-emissions industry.

“But every text, video stream and virtual meeting has a carbon impact and creating awareness around the choices we make is important,” he said.

For datacentre operators, those choices centre around energy and water, both of which are required to run their facilities and provide suitable internal conditions such as temperature and humidity.

“Running closed water systems for cooling in datacentres and powering them with renewable energy must be the default as we move into a more digital future,” said Agrawal.

He also pointed out an oft-forgotten area of carbon impact – laptops. “As the world becomes more affluent, everyone wants a new laptop without regard for what that entails and what happens to their old devices,” he said. “Radical transformations are required at the policy level and at the consumer level to encourage repairability and recyclability in laptops.”

Beware of greenwashing

With more consumers now expecting firms to undertake environmental, social, and governance (ESG) efforts, companies that feel pressured to act quickly could misrepresent or overstate their actions.

“Misrepresenting your firm’s environmental sustainability policies and actions will result in customer backlash, loss of brand credibility and trust, and, potentially, fines,” said Forrester’s Barnes.

“In fact, Forrester expects at least 50 firms in APAC to be penalised for performative ESG efforts in 2023. Offenders could face penalties of $10m or more as APAC regulators follow the footsteps of their US and European counterparts and clamp down on misleading ESG claims.”

Barnes added: “Avoid greenwashing by acting with authenticity, openness and transparency at all times, and acknowledge your mistakes with empathy and courage.”

The lack of measurement and standards around ESG does not help, either. A recent study by Oxford Economics and SAP found that while 62% of Indian businesses said it is not difficult to be sustainable and profitable at the same time, just 17% have calculated their total carbon input. And among those that have acted on a sustainability strategy, only 7% are receiving significant value from it.

Agrawal said: “If we are to create a global accounting system to measure the journey towards net zero, we need some level of uniformity in how we collect and process data and the meaning we derive from that.

“Using a global standard or one accepted industry-wide is essential in the collaborative path towards the Paris Agreement. Using a standard format for measurement also helps maintain consistency over the years to be able to understand your own journey in terms of the progress made and lessons learned.”