Amur S. Lakshminarayanan
Dear Stakeholders,
Hope you and your families are safe and healthy.
As we embark on reimagining a ‘new’ world together, shared trust, purpose and brands for good are becoming the new paradigm. The power of businesses, behaviours and brands are enabling the development of new ecosystems—natural and others. In this midst, leading from the front for environmental protection, social impact and economic viability is pivotal for the long-term sustenance of our planet.
Our planet, our responsibility!
I believe embedding sustainability into the fabric of our
business is proving to be beneficial to us, our customers,
partners, employees and suppliers, alike. As we drive digital
transformations for enterprises enabling digital ecosystems for
them, sustainability is now intrinsic and integral to our ethos
and engagement.
Strengthening our sustainability efforts, we are driving commitment towards greater transparency, deeper engagement, and stakeholder management. Having aligned our Sustainable Development Report to Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards, we are upscaling our sustainable journey to a completely new level especially with technology becoming a life pivot.
Technology: A sustainability partner
Technology has played the critical enabler role for humanity
to sustain – in continued essential services, access to
healthcare, education, and entertainment amidst lockdowns.
Our prompt actions, ensuring the safety of our employees while implementing virtualised work protocols even before
they were mandated, have gained us tremendous goodwill.
We are adaptive and responsive to the technology-driven
sustainable transitions that are becoming the new world order
for everyone everyday.
Agile, Adaptive, Ahead
To be ahead in these uncertain times, agility and adaptability
are vital. Through the ages, we have observed how technology
has always been a key global growth enabler. But today, the
digital economy is creating a unique opportunity for the world
to transition towards a sustainable future. Agile, adaptive and
always thinking ahead, are the enormous potentials of digitally
enabled communications for accelerating positive collective
transformation. As a global digital ecosystem enabler, we are
proud to be at the forefront of this profound shift enabling
the digital economy of today and the future. Our objective
is to leverage technology for creating new efficiencies and
sustainable growth via judicious natural resources usage. Our
recent study highlights how company’s low carbon products
and services enable our customers to cut down their Green
House Gas (GHG) emissions by almost three times.
Shared value for our ecosystem
Our GHG emissions reduction will take us a long way in
driving shared value for our ecosystem. As supporters of the
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we
are focusing on reducing our carbon footprint and dedicating
our reach and technology to help our customers transform
their businesses while conserving resources and harnessing
our digital enablement expertise, to drive community development. We are establishing a position in protecting
the environment by reducing our dependencies on natural
ecosystems, enhancing our ability to produce goods and
services that yield economic, environmental, and social
benefits. I firmly believe, our collective human effort is the
need of the hour.
At the same time, Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) principles are our guiding force for our actions, are helping us create sustained value for our stakeholders. As we helped organisations this year with digital transformation solutions, we are realising these are enabling our customers to reduce their carbon footprint, giving us a greater opportunity to scaling beyond our identified sustainability targets. This progress is motivating and encouraging us to further drive sustainability as a culture within the organisation globally.
Sustainability as our culture
Embedding sustainability into the fabric of the organisation has
been a personal charter for me. For this, we are introducing
a training e-module on “Sustainability and its Business
relevance” for employees. This module builds awareness
about driving business sustainability in the Information and
Communication Technologies (ICT) sector, including climate
change issues and other environmental challenges as well as
our Company’s sustainability approach and strategy.
For our business operations, we have developed and adopted evolved systems and technology for monitoring and governing energy, water efficiency, waste management with the intent of inspiring behavioural change. Advocacy and sensitisation are a part of this drive, and we appreciate the hard work put in by the organisation towards this. We were thus excited and happy on being recognised by the renowned global environmental non-profit organisation, Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), which accorded us a distinguished ‘A-‘ for our sustainability initiatives. The score, which is higher than the global average of ‘C’ and higher than the Asia region average of ‘D’, acknowledged our role in climate change governance, value chain management and energy efficiency. These initiatives have borne us good results. We sourced approximately 23 million kWh (14%) of renewable energy globally and implemented emission reduction initiatives that resulted in energy savings to the tune of 4.3 million units. Our employees collaborated, learned and participated in digital and physical awareness activities on sustainability during the Tata Sustainability Month (TSM) in June. A global tools down day, ‘DRIVE week’ enabled employees to take up community action. This year we had 7,572 employees volunteering 31,000+ hours helping ~0.4 million beneficiaries. Currently, we are implementing 17 projects in education, employability and sustainable livelihood promotion and healthcare.
Our increased diversity and inclusion quotient
Sharpening our human resource management abilities, we
endeavour to provide an open, inclusive and enabling work
environment to our employees. The Tata Communications
Learning Academy (TCLA), the one-stop-shop for learning at
Tata Communications, enables employees to skill, upskill and
reskill using world-class learning channels for personal and
professional development to nurture their career trajectory.
Driving enhancements in diversity and inclusion is a key focus
for us. This focus is reflected in the increased number of
female colleagues from 16% in FY 2013-14 to 22% at the end
of FY 2020-21. These results serve as a testimony of a
disciplined governance rigor. As part of our sustainability
culture, our teams also embark on upskilling, diversity and
inclusion activities.
Our governance
We aspire to follow global best practices in all our business
functions and are governing ourselves through Company’s and
the Tata group values as well as the Tata Code of Conduct.
These principles inspire and empower us to take action with
integrity, maintaining high ethical standards, and respecting
fundamental human rights. I would also like to share that;
we have also completed our Human Rights assessment. We
have trained 92% of our employees on Human Rights through trainings on ‘Business Code of Conduct’ and ‘Dignity at the
Workplace’. Like every year, this year too, we participated in the
Tata group ‘Ethics Week’ through activities and communication
drives to create awareness on the importance of ethics. We
continue to strive in making a difference to our world.
Our commitment
We remain committed to our strategy of improving our
people engagement, driving higher resource conservation,
promoting renewable energy, supporting our customers and
caring for the community for progressing towards a better
world together. We will continue to support the United Nations
SDGs, strive to perform better on our own goals and evolve
in our sustainability disclosures. We are aiming for technology
and connectivity benefiting everyone and are useful in tackling
some of the world’s biggest challenges; embracing empathy,
prosperity for a kinder, cleaner world, and continuing to focus
on social responsibility and environmental sustainability.
It has been a tremendous year that has tested the resilience of people and the planet. We have a sense of satisfaction for the value we have co-created with you and our stakeholders. I take this opportunity to thank all our stakeholders for being an integral part of this journey and our extended family. We reaffirm our resolve towards the People, Planet and Communities as we reimagine tomorrow, today.
Regards,
Amur S. Lakshminarayanan
Managing Director & CEO
Tata Communications Limited
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