I addressed the four issues in my keynote address
How clean is IT?
How to clean IT?
How green is IT?
How to green IT?
First
How clean it IT?
Most of us think of IT as most clean, which it is most of the time. The picture of an enterprise in the industrial age was a smoke stack; our own Cement Mills (remember ACC) and Thermal Power stations (remember State Electricity Boards) used to throw fine dust for miles causing TB to thousands around; our sugar mills used to “small” for miles. On the contrary, IT in India conjures up Infosys campus – miles of green lawns, swimming pools, Gym, food courts and even ATMs and shopping malls – employees working out, eating shopping and writing code in between! Obviously IT is clean; so youngsters love to work for IT companies. They even bring democracy – everyone from Chairman to the youngest engineer use the same food court, library, computers and the network.
If you look beneath there are problems; with more than one computer per employee, IT companies consume lots of power; the data center alone consumes lots of power. Thanks to poor state of state-run utilities, most IT companies have to run their own generators, making the place not so clean. More important, most of the parts used by PCS and other IT equipment has arsenic; often they are NOT disposed off well, leading to lots of pollution.
At another level too IT is clean; IT industry in India is known for upright personalities like Mr NR Narayana Murthy & Mr Azim Premji and their iconic companies Infosys & Wipro that do not succumb to political pressures for patronage and bribery, until the unfortunate case of Satyam that surface on January 7, 2009
How to clean IT?
Already there are initiatives like ELCIA in Electronics City (with help from Wipro) collecting all IT related stuff – old CDs, old pen drives, printer cartridges..- and disposing them off in agreed dumps. Nokia has been collecting used phones.
I would urge the Government IT Department to help in creating special “dump yards” for IT waste (electronic waste) and appropriate policy. Bangalore has played a leadership role; the first State in the world to create a position of Secretary for IT; Central Government (and most State governments had followed Bangalore and so are many countries). Similarly STPI started functioning from Bangalore (not Delhi) thanks to the visionary vision of the then Secretary Mr N Vittal. I do hope the current IT Secretary (Mr Ashok Manoli who is in the Chair) will take the initiative.
We need to ensure that IT industry continue its clean image and Satyam is an exception. It is nice to see NASSCOM creating an Ethics Council chaired by Mr NR Narayana Murthy.
How green is IT?
On the face of it, the IT industry is definitely green. There are no polluting chemicals produced. With most of the investment going into people, IT is inherently green. However with the wealth created and shared by IT industry professionals, there are more cars on the streets leading to gas emissions and the global warming.
The data centers are power guzzlers. Just the three forms Google, Yahoo and Microsoft run huge data centers (Google has more than million servers) to run their “search” business (which alone is estimated to account for 20+ percent of the total data centers in the world). The data centers account for more than 10% of the total industrial electricity consumption. So IT industry does contribute to carbon credits and global warming
How to green IT?
Most of the recent IT seminars (including this Seminar) witll address the greening of data centers. It is the need of the hour. That addresses the “core” of the problem; but we should look at the “edge” too. The handsets, the PCs, the PDA’s and a range of “customer premise equipment” including iPod and cameras must turn green. In the CES 2009 show in January 2009, Motorola show-cased a mobile handset made of disposable chemicals (from water bottles). We should have more such innovation.
Also the IT professionals in their lives should start getting “green aware”; may be start car pooling
In short, IT industry has generally been clean and green; but we need to be constantly aware of making it further clean & green.
(Keynote Address given on February 11, 2009 in the MAIT Seminar on Green IT at Leela Hotel)
