Azim Premji does not believe in wasting anything, least of all his time. That he spent over an hour talking to us shows how important ecology is to him
Why is it important for Wipro to start diversifying into ecology?
Don’t narrow your perception on what we are trying to do just to diversification. There are other dimensions, as a citizen - ecological sustainability is a global problem but completely unaddressed in India.
Second, every year we set a target for conserving water used by the company. That’s an aggressive target of improvements of about 10-15 percent every year, inspite of more complexities and longer working hours.
Third we see incremental business opportunities that we can create in our existing businesses, like green lighting and green data centers.
On the fourth axis really is how you create a new business like Wipro Water, we see water as an important beachhead where we can build a global business.
As far as renewable energy goes we have identified a very major opportunity called renewable energy, frankly we don’t have a fit of it, what is it wind power, is it solar, is it the blades of wind power plants
Would you look at that model as well, invest in a startup that has promise and then merge that company in Wipro?
Why not? We can do it through Premji Invest which is our investment arm.
(This story appears in the 03 July, 2009 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)