Indian IT industry’s lobby body Nasscom says it can motivate the more than two million currently employed in the sector to become ‘green warriors’ — environment-friendly citizens who would spread the green word in our societies and create awareness.
This is part of Nasscom’s ‘green IT initiative’ that also seeks to move all the green talk from being a corporate social responsibility thing into a business imperative.
"We have been speaking to people within and outside the IT industry. Green IT was beginning to sound like a loosely-used term," vice president at Nasscom Rajdeep Sahrawat says.
So the body has now laid out a three-point agenda: Make the IT industry adopt green technologies and practices, help other industries become greener using IT, and transform the IT-BPO sector’s employees into green crusaders.
The first imperative — turning the IT industry green — is a low hanging fruit, says Sahrawat. Most new campuses that are coming up are environment friendly; some companies have also "greened" their older campuses. This means that they now have green buildings, use green computing infrastructure such as energy-efficient data centres and power-efficient PCs; they also have good e-waste management policies.
Bengaluru-based IT services firm Frontier Business Systems, for instance, has set up a new green facility at an investment of $4 million — the firm says the building scores highly on key environmental categories such as indoor air quality, energy and water efficiency. The green building also hosts a green data center and showcases green virtualisation solutions.
After the first do-it-yourself approach, comes the ‘help’ other sectors agenda. "IT will have a play in implementing smart grids, smart meters that could help monitor electricity consumption in real time, in intelligent transport systems," Sahrawat says.
Solutions that firms can market under the green IT category include cloud computing, video-conferencing, Web-conferencing, motion and heat detection sensors.
Nasscom had formed three working groups in January with representation from the government, industry, NGOs, and consultants. The groups will define a roadmap over the next 12-24 months.
"We need good data points and have therefore commissioned a research project on green IT in the Indian context," Sahrawat says. Nasscom may now work with the government on various green initiatives.
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