Office shifting – Environmental consequences

This is a post on the issues that are and are not reckoned when an office shifts. The focus is not on any one company but the general trend. In Delhi, it is for companies to get out of Delhi, to Gurgaon or Noida, preferably the former, the urban expanse that is deluging millions of column inches and consuming megabytes in the media.

The focus is on what is not reckoned. From the title it must be clear it is about environmental consequences. But, the focus will sharpen only gradually.

Let us take a fictitious company that was operating from that glorified slum called Nehru Place. The company grew up in Nehru Place but it had become too big, and also too prestigious, to stay at home. So, it flew the coop to, where else, Gurgaon, to be in a metaphoric gated corporate community, abutting the international airport.

In Nehru Place, the company was somewhat scattered, occupying many floors in three buildings in chicken wire meshes, the employees forced to mingle with the less worthies of Indian society. All this changed in Gurgaon. It now occupies two floors of one of those ubiquitous, apparently exclusive towers (not taller than, say, 25 m).

The building is centrally air-conditioned. Has the thermal load of the company increased or decreased due to this shift? I would not hazard a guess, but it is more than likely that the power load has decreased, given the frequent brown-outs, black-outs in Gurgaon! After all, the company shifted from a glorified slum to a glorified village. In slums one pilfers power but in a village one can hardly exercise that option.

The available alternative is back-up generation, captive diesel generation (that sounded more impressive than the run-of-the-mill diesel generators, I hope). Effect on carbon emissions? Do not know.

In Nehru Place, the office must have been cooled to cater to the fancies of the occupants of various offices. You are at the top of the heap, you get two split units; a step below, it is one split unit; a step lower, it is a window unit and on down the line. This is inefficient from power consumption point of view. It is for these complexities, reckoning the shift in power consumption efficiency, reckoned environmentally, is not very easy and I give up.

In Gurgaon, everyone must be confined to his or her gilded cubicle, even in the open architecture set up. What does it do to the environment? Ironically, noise pollution is reduced, the model says! If you shouted, you will be heard not by ten people – as it would have been in Nehru Place – but by tens of that many here. People must be talking in whispers then. This is good, on the environmental scale.

The office also must have – whether brought in kicking and screaming or not – accepted a certain level of reduced paper consumption. The trees-saved calculations are beyond this writer’s capabilities. But, qualitatively, it may be simply asserted that trees are being saved.

But, I come to the most crucial issue – transport. Let us assume that the company, when anchored at Nehru Place, was indifferent to environment. This can be inferred from the fact that perhaps in a skewed understanding of incentivizing people, the company offered graded commuting allowance to its employees. The skew is not in the gradation but in the parameters used to grade. If you used public transport, you got a certain amount. But, if you owned a two-wheeler (petrol driven), you got more than twice that amount; for a four-wheeler, the factor was four. Geometric series. Note that, you merely needed to own a petrol driven vehicle – and prove to the company that you did own one – and you are under no obligation to commute by it.

Perhaps the company was justifying its policy through some macro-economic logic. By buying vehicles, its employees are feeding the economy, spurring circulation of money in it. But, once you buy a vehicle, it takes super-human will power not to use it. That is when carbon emissions come into reckoning.

Assume also that this was pointed out by an employee, informally and only orally, to her immediate senior and also to her colleagues. But none cared, because each has his or her self-interest (I almost typed out, “his or her own self-interest”, but checked myself in time; who else but you can work in your “self-interest”?). So, it must have continued in Nehru Place till the shift happened.

As many companies in Gurgaon do, this newcomer must also be ferrying people in buses, from and to Delhi. Yes, this must be a positive shift in reducing carbon transmissions on the transport count, particularly if you discounted that over the past three years many people could have been commuting to Nehru Place by metro. Then, the carbon emissions calculations get a little more complex. I will ignore.

The employee who raised her voice against graded commuting allowance was not ready to take this plan sitting down. She pointed out the advantage – again informally –a last-mile connectivity offer at the Gurgaon end by the company to its staff, both ways, but was ignored. The company may have taken a single step up in being environmentally conscious but stopped at that. No scaling up.

The company, I conclude in the overall reckoning, is merely less indifferent to the environment than it was when in Nehru Place. Is this something to write home about? I wouldn’t know.

Raghuram Ekambaram