Disaster Relief and Support
Bharti Airtel has a nation-wide presence that has grown at an exponential rate in the recent years. Each local office undertakes special programs for the local community, thereby touching their lives directly. From time to time various initiatives like material collection, tree plantation, adoption of old age homes and orphanages, blood donation camps, etc are undertaken for the welfare of fellow beings in need.
Bharti Airtel has contributed Rs 10 mn each for helping in flood relief for Chief Ministers Relief Funds for Andhra Pradesh & Karnataka states. Educational support was provided to children of Guwahati blast victims in North East states. During Mumbai floods last year, employees climbed up the towers to restore the networks so that our customers can connect with their near and dear ones. Company’s ‘Rapid Response Team’ responded to the Kashmir earthquake by bringing more than 2,000 food packets and water bottles to the affected area. Money, clothes, woolens and blankets were also collected from employees to distribute among earthquake victims.
Think Green
Bharti Airtel is committed towards taking steps to protect environment either by direct initiatives or conserving the by-products to reduce fossil fuel consumption.
We have been running power saving programs in our offices and on network operations for over 5 years now. These programs help in reducing costs and our carbon footprint. Airtel has pioneered the Green Shelter concept for BTS. This unique shelter comes with optimal cooling, power and thermal management systems, minimising the running of backup systems like diesel generator sets. The solution reduces operational costs by as much as 40% as compared to conventional shelters and avoids being a cause of global warming, as the greenhouse gas emissions are minimal.
Green IT has been a focus area at Airtel and has been a key in all IT decisions and strategies which includes IT infrastructure at our office buildings & data centers. Airtel and its partners are working to assess our IT energy efficiency holistically, which will help the Company apply an end–to–end strategy that integrates the key components of the energy picture. The Company has taken initiatives to achieve vision of environment conservation and a team is driving its ‘Green’ program through the key focused areas of paperless initiative, data center optimisation, desk-side initiatives and employee awareness programs.
Initiatives have been taken to reduce paper in the day to day working operations both for internal as well as external customers. Processes are introduced to enable paperless workflow based methodologies and approval mechanisms within the Company. This automation not only provides higher efficiency but has proven to be extremely useful in reducing consumption of paper within the organisation.
Bharti Airtel’s initiative of e-bill to reduce paper based transactions for statements has been quite successful. With post paid customer base of more than 10 mn, this initiative is a big area to achieve environmental conservation. The Company promotes usage of e-bills to its customers via several incentives from time to time.
Being a technology oriented industry; Bharti Airtel has taken various significant initiatives in data center domain to reduce electricity consumption. As a part of first phase we have already consolidated 26 data centers to 4 regional data centers and saved space as well as power. In the second phase of this initiative, we are working on server/ storage consolidation within the same location and target to deliver 10% - 15% enhanced productivity.
The Company uses electrical equipments with high energy efficiency and low anti environment emissions. This is a key factor while procuring any electrical equipment. Initiatives like use of water based chilling unit at new data centers for cooling instead of gas based are helping in protecting the environment and depletion of ozone layer.
As part of desk side initiatives, Bharti Airtel is migrating most of its users from Desktop PC to Laptops. This movement is expected to give a saving of close to 3 MW of power which would be sufficient to light close to 6,000 houses in rural India at an average consumption of 500 W per house. All desktops / laptops which are refreshed with newer ones are released to be donated to Bharti Foundation for educating the children studying at the Satya Bharti Schools.
There has also been an initiative to move towards Green OS (Windows 7), which is expected to save power to the tune of Rs 2,000 per machine per year, leading to huge saving of IT power. Various activities to render more and more applications on mobile are underway; thus reducing the dependency on desktop resulting in further reducing power consumption.
Bharti Airtel is associated with The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP); an organisation based in UK which works with shareholders and corporations to disclose the greenhouse gas emissions of major corporations. From past three years we have been constantly measuring our carbon footprint.
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