Ashiss Dash’s Post

On the morning of October 28th, 2020, I grabbed my coffee and browed thru the news. The stories: Hurricane Zeta’s impending landfall, a record number of Covid-19 cases in Germany, and Infosys turning carbon neutral.   This was momentous. The firm I worked at reached the coveted neutrality milestone 30 years ahead of timeline set by the Paris Agreement. It felt even more meaningful to have this announced during those difficult times. A bit of optimism in a long news cycle of gloom and doom.   I looked out the window on yet another work-from-home day, thinking of the journey. The footprint had been managed for a company of close to 300,000 people spread across 50 countries. The scale of the operation had been quite massive. It began a decade earlier with a vision to decarbonize. And to measure it every step of the way. The race to net zero was started by our leaders in the early days, and as our founders used to say, “In God we trust. Everybody else brings data to the table.”   Being a technology company, it came naturally to us to build the tools we needed for collecting and analyzing massive amounts of data from across our value chain, including scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. Over time, data turned into a virtuous circle of insights and actions that ultimately led to Infosys reducing per capita monthly electricity consumption by 55%, cutting our greenhouse gas emissions by half, 57% of our energy on campus coming from renewable sources, and saving $200 million in electricity costs. But behind the numbers was the hard work of a dedicated bunch of people, and it was them I was thinking of on that pandemic day. They were out there watching the stations in what I like to think of as our 3 epicenters of sustainability. Our strategy was hinged on reducing energy consumption, investing in clean energy, and offsetting emissions.   First were the Infoscions in our massive command center in Bangalore, who monitor close to 40,000 connected energy devices across all our campuses, watching our footprint by the hour. Second is a place called Sira in Karnataka, India. It would take you about half an hour on a buggy ride to traverse the entire span of the solar panels installed here, which alone produce 40 MW of the 60 MW of our captive solar power. It’s a massive undertaking, and the people here leverage data to optimize everything from tilt angles to grid transmission. Third is Koppal, a rural area in Karnataka, where we began our carbon offset programs with biomass cookstoves, scaling to hundreds of volunteers touching 240,000 families with our initiatives.   It is this commitment, of people working together with data, that produced the outcome of neutrality for Infosys. It inspired me to take up my own journey of sustainability, getting solar panels on my roof, going off the grid and offsetting my own travel footprint.   It continues to inspire us, with the story having made it to the World Economic Forum, for many more to take the road to #EnergyTransitionNow.