Bengaluru water crisis: Firms gulp more but also pledge to reduce usage

livemint.com:

India’s tech hub Bengaluru has been grappling with an acute water crisis for the past few weeks. The city’s high concentration of major industries—beyond just tech—has set alarm bells ringing with temperatures set to shoot up further. While it’s not possible to track water usage at offices across the city, a similar exercise for listed companies headquartered in Karnataka’s capital revealed an 11% collective increase in consumption in 2022-23.

Out of the top 1,000 BSE-listed firms by market capitalization, 56 have their registered office in India’s Silicon Valley. However, only 45 of them had relevant data that was reliably available, and these were part of the analysis. The top five of these, based on revenues, showed a 12.3% increase in water consumption in 2022-23, the latest year for which data is available.

Public sector firms reported an aggregate 2.2% growth, while private sector firms increased their water use by 21%, the analysis showed. Companies disclosed these numbers in their annual reports under the business responsibility and sustainability reporting guidelines. These trends do not represent the water consumption for only the Bengaluru region as companies have offices or plants across cities and even abroad.

Given the size of these companies, this analysis is only a proxy to assess the sensitivities that may guide businesses across their operations by virtue of being headquartered in a highly water-stressed city. That said, the companies in the analysis also saw a rise in their volumes of water consumed in specific areas of water stress (based on the availability and applicability of the data), which did include offices and plants located in Bengaluru. But there were outliers too: AstraZeneca Pharma India