“REDUCED DIESEL CONSUMPTION BY 9% IN FY25”

L&T's Anup Sahay on how taking hard, quantifiable initiatives helped the company make visible progress on sustainability goals

- BY KRISHNA GOPALAN

IT IS NOT easy to achieve sustainability at scale, especially when there are multiple business operations. In an interview with Business Today, Anup Sahay, Head, Corporate Strategy & Special Initiatives, L&T, elaborates on how the company has fared on sustainability so far. Edited excerpts:

What makes the L&T sustainability story a complex one?

When you speak of carbon footprint coming into the world, what comes to mind are hard-to-abate industries like power, transportation, metals, and chemicals. We are not in that set. Construction as an activity itself contributes less than 2% of global emissions.

But we still have another context, which is unique to us or companies like us. We operate on a scale that encompasses our construction and infrastructure projects across 800-plus sites. These are not permanent places where we conduct our business activities and normally remain there for 2-5 years. There is no finite or defined boundary of that construction site, with many of them at remote locations. The challenge is to create a sustainability movement that addresses the environment and the kind of energy we use, thereby reducing emissions and managing waste effectively.